Iron and Crystal
by Exulansist
Summary: Sarah defeated Jareth on her first go-'round in the labyrinth, but her victory was neither neat nor absolute. Several years later, she tries to tie off a loose end, but a delighted Jareth knows this particular story all too well. Another take on post-film Labyrinth via the very related Greek mythos around Theseus/Ariadne/Dionysus.
1. Prologos

It is always the same story.

Girl meets Boy, Boy irritates Girl, Girl likes Boy, happy ending.

It is, until it isn't.

Girl meets Boy, Boy torments Girl, Girl is victorious over Boy, Boy haunts Girl for the rest of her life.

It's difficult to have a clear conscience about laying the full brunt of the blame on Boy's shoulders when the impetus that drew him to Girl in the first place was a wish for the disappearance of her little half-brother, and Boy is simply in the business of granting wishes, but I couldn't have known that at the time. I couldn't have known much of anything at the time.

Sometimes I think it might be the same story after all, and I've just gotten ahead of myself.

The meet-cute was Girl collecting her victory over Boy, because of course when Boy is really King, steeped in fae blood and mythos, collecting infant tithes in exchange for wishes and dreams, he sees many unremarkable girls. It was this Girl who was unlucky enough to become remarkable to a King.

And when a King is told he cannot have that for which he lusts, he grows angry. And when an angry King has the power even to reorder the stars in the sky and rearrange the ebb and flow of time, Boy irritates Girl is nothing to scoff at.

I've been running for my entire life. Just not in the direction you might expect.

* * *

They say that fate's golden thread connecting two souls cannot be broken. I should know. If anyone could tamper with it, that anyone ought to be me.

I, who, unlike Icarus, fly too close to the sun and remain unsinged. I, who hear the song of newly-formed stars. I, who collect the stuff of dreams and with it, spin time.

I, who wear the thorned golden circlet upon my brow, to whom all others bend the knee.

It happens the same way each time. Time does not stretch infinitely before and behind us, but rather is a circle: continuous, unbroken, destined to repeat itself whether or not we choose to remember what has come before. Time is the serpent, swallowing its own tail; it does not understand or mark its own beginning or ending, but is continuously reborn, sustained by its own remains.

Here is the harbinger of a new beginning: a woman makes a wish.

Young or old, slothful or spry, each possesses the certain strain of weakness of will that compels her to wish away her discontentment rather than to take action of her own volition. Mortals are droll in that particular way. They are capricious, mercurial.

They are simple-minded and obtuse.

After the woman makes her wish, I come to collect. The amusing little creature always offers the payment first, leaving her real wish unspoken. As the purveyor of dreams, it is not difficult to offer each one a gift in exchange, drawing on her own innermost desires.

Most are lost in the crystallized dream I offer them before I even say a word, reaching out blindly for it. It is an effortless transition into a tranquil, empty existence.

Some fight and cry, unable to grasp the power and the subsequent repercussions of language.

What's said is said. Accept the gift of ignorance.

Those who persist wander my labyrinth for hours. Some fall prey to the oubliettes, some to the fire-creatures, but most never even step foot inside the maze proper, unable even to find the entrance. I populate my court with their offerings as they return home to a changeling unfit for mortal existence, who shrivels away beneath the rain of their tears.

Then: a girl. Long, straight dark hair, sad green eyes, a wisp of a thing.

It happens the same way each time until the golden thread of destiny snags the gears of time, grinding them to a halt, and then there is hell to be paid.

* * *

It goes like this: there was once a young princess who wished she was not.

There was once a monster, prowling a maze.

There was once a boy, a beautiful boy, a boy whose bravery and cunning shone brightly in his eyes.

There was once a jealous god.

There was once a vengeful king.

In his quest for revenge, the king demanded a recurring penance from those who had wronged him, until the weight of the penance far outweighed the original wrong. Still the king sought vengeance, for he would not forget and his temper could not be soothed.

The boy - the beautiful boy - was to be offered as a sacrifice to the king by way of the monster.

The young princess, who wished she was not, loved the boy, though she had only seen him from afar. She came to him in the disguise of night and whispered to him the secret of the maze.

The boy slew the monster and escaped the maze, to the great displeasure of the wrathful king.

The boy eloped with the princess, who was determined to leave behind her title, her crown, her glory, all for the novelty of love and the chance to change the course of her life, which until now had seemed marble-hewn, immutable.

And what of the god?

We know this story, and we know that it does not have a happy ending, and we know that some monsters cannot be slain.

Who is the true monster? The king? The god? The boy?

Is it the princess?

* * *

When I think too hard about it, I get all tangled up in the metaphysical. What is victory? What does it mean to be victorious? My defeat of him should have been complete, but when I rejected his offer, he grew angry, and when he is angry, even the pillars of time and space quake.

When I returned Aboveground, he had returned a child to the cradle in the master bedroom, but the child was sickly. Toby has been pale and consumptive for his entire life, such as it's been. He coughs up blood at night, but the doctors can't find the source or tell us what's wrong with him. He can't focus, spends most of his days in bed, is plagued by headaches and fevers, sleeps fitfully, can't put any meat on his bones.

Victory may be in name only, especially when the nearly omnipotent arbitrator is personally involved. Of course Dad and Karen never suspected that I might have wished their plump, hearty little boy away, that he might have been taken by a god-king whose power defies understanding, and that even though I ran the labyrinth and won back my brother, maybe Toby's time Underground had changed him. Even if I chose to tell them the story, they'd brush it off as my overactive imagination. Shifting dimensions taking their toll on my brother? They'd have to be crazy to begin to consider it.

Still, I'd been around long enough afterward to hear them talking about it in hushed tones, my little brother's sudden conversion to invalid, even before he turned two. Medical professionals are at a loss. Toby is simply, mysteriously unlucky.

Unlucky is right. He was unlucky enough to have been born to a mother and father who gifted him with a wicked half-sister. Sometimes sorry can't mend fences.

So now I live with guilt, and I have spent my entire life in penance.

I've had a long time to think about it, many hours in hospital waiting rooms with my hands clasped in my lap, waiting for the nurse to tell me I can go to his bedside. Many hours in my bedroom next to his, listening to his rattling cough. The best I've been able to do so far is wonder how far the god-king's power reaches, for all I declared was that he had no power over me.

I hadn't thought about whether or not he might have still had power over Toby.

I've tried saying the words. I've wished myself away more times than I can count, and he has never come to spirit me away. He is not amenable to an exchange. He does not want to speak with me. He is punishing me with distance and silence, and it is far worse than I could have ever imagined in my wildest dreams, watching my brother wither away to a husk of a child, robbed of a normal childhood.

But maybe that's not the way it works, not anymore. Who's to say the rules can't change?

I started a degree in English literature and eventually walked it over to folklore, hoping against hope to find something that could help me figure out how to cure my brother. I spent hours poring over dusty textbooks in hushed study carrels, buried deep in the stacks of my university library. By the time I'd earned my cap and tassel, all I knew was that I didn't know enough, but my professors mistook my perseverance for dedication to the studies, and my advisor recommended that I look into graduate degrees in library science.

Library science.

Well, it didn't exactly fit the trajectory I'd expected for my life post-graduation, but then again, there's no degree tailored exactly for "I accidentally sold my brother's soul to the goblin king and need to win it back," so I had to improvise. A year and change into the degree, I found myself making more and more time to delve deeply into the resources this library had, and folklore seemed my best bet for figuring out how to stage a return to the Underground. Folklore and mythology. I earned myself a reputation for being well-read, but such a niche subject doesn't exactly bring students flocking to me for help, so most days I staffed the help desk, a towering stack of thick tomes gathering even more dust beside me.

Enter Joshua.

Josh is one of my fellow students. He's very into data science, and somehow found himself shunted over into my library to try to help better catalogue the books. I'm pretty sure "Dewey Decimal be damned" is his mantra, though I don't understand the depths of his hatred for the system. It always works well enough for me.

He showed up at the beginning of this year, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as only a first year graduate student can be, just brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. The first time he showed up, leaning against my desk and chattering on and on about efficiency in organization, I crooked an eyebrow at him and went back to the book. He talked too much, but his excitement was catching, at least for the first few minutes, and it drew a reluctant smile from my mouth.

Josh is the kind of kid that every girl's mother loves at first sight. He's the overachiever: the football captain, the science fair project winner, the valedictorian, the homecoming king, all rolled into one all-American package. He's tall, his shoulders are broad and muscular, he has a perpetually messy shock of dirty blond hair, his eyes are blue and his nose is always faintly sunburnt, smoothed over with freckles. He's well-spoken; he probably championed a debate team, too, and his smile is easy and contagious - and dimpled.

"Sarah, right?" he asked.

I decided against pointing out that we'd met several times before and indicated the little plaque on the desk where my name was printed.

"Awesome. I'm Josh. Getting your Master's degree here in the library, huh?"

"Trying to," I said, closing the book with a little teasing huff, "but cheeky little pipsqueaks like you keep getting in my way."

"Well, as long as you're distracted, want to run out for a beer with me?" His grin was saucy, kept me on my toes.

"I have to stay here until closing, which I'm sure you know already," I said. "You can bring me dinner, though, if you want. I like bacon on my cheeseburgers."

He clutched his chest. "A woman after my own heart. I'll see you in twenty minutes." Reaching over the desk, he tweaked the end of my braid and then sauntered out of the library. I returned to Peer Gynt, but with the detachment that I've come to nurture within my breast to crowd out the constant hope-despair cycles. Silly to pin my hopes on books from the fiction section, but I can't stop looking for anything that might clue me in. The mountain king may be a goblin king, but he is not my Goblin King. I flipped the whisper-thin pages, my eyes skimming over the pages until the smell of food roused me from my studies.

"Got you a surprise," he said, and produced two burgers, wrapped in foil.

"Isn't this what I ordered? I'm not surprised yet."

With a flourish, he procured two beers in frosty green glass bottles. They clinked softly against each other. "If you can't go out for a beer, we'll have one here."

I laughed despite myself, but couldn't help looking nervously around the room. "If we get caught with those in here, we'll face serious disciplinary action. They'll make examples of us!"

"Not if they don't catch us," he replied, popping the cap off of the first with a bottle opener attached to his keys. The keys jangled, loudly, and I shrunk in my chair. "Come on, Sarah, there are two people in here and they're not paying attention. Peel your label off and pretend it's soda if that will help soothe your nerves."

He was right; the library was nearly deserted, as was usually the case at 9:00pm on any given Friday night. The first student was sleeping on the library's copy of a physics textbook, probably drooling on it, and the second had his back to us, huge noise-canceling headphones snapped securely over his ears. I took the beer.

"So, Sarah, tell me about yourself," he said, unwrapping his burger halfway and taking a bite. A drop of ketchup fell onto the desk, and I wiped it up with a tissue from the box next to me.

"I'm a second year student," I said. "I'm particularly interested in mythology and folklore about ancient kings and magical creatures, which basically makes me unhirable, so here I am, honing my librarian skill set. I can find you a book in under two minutes flat, as long as we have it here in stock. And if we don't, I can arrange to have it sent here from one of our partner libraries."

"Gods and kings and magic, huh?" A shit-eating grin creased his likable face. "I knew you'd be interesting. No one with hair that long is uninteresting."

"You'd be surprised," I retorted, taking a bite of my own burger. I swallowed, then burped, the carbonation from the beer making its noisy escape. I blushed, but Josh just laughed.

"I like a girl to be a real person."

"Well, you're in luck, because I haven't met a single woman in my travels on earth so far who wasn't a real person."

He laughed again. "When the library closes in an hour, come with me to the closest dive bar. I'll bet you're a whiskey drinker, too, and let me tell you, their well whiskey is far better than any of their other well drinks."

"As long as it's on you, I'm down," I said, grinning at him.

"I already got dinner, so you'll have to buy us the first round, but I'll get the rest. It's only because you look like a person with a story, and I love stories."

"You think I'm just going to spill my secrets because you loosened me up a little?"

"What else is whiskey for? I'm a great conversationalist. I'll help us break the ice, and then I expect to hear the interesting parts of your life story."

It had been a while since I'd gone out drinking, and he was just the type of guy Karen would love, and it was this chance conglomerate that solidified my resolve to see it through. He struck my fancy, too. Cute guy, skilled flirt, bought me dinner. It was the least I could do to let him buy me some drinks tonight, too.

When I locked the library up, he was practically bouncing beside me, plaid flannel shirt hanging open over a white undershirt, backpack hanging loosely from one strap over one shoulder. Sometimes life is lonely as a graduate student, even as a brand new member of the next eager class of overachievers. Maybe he was tired of the constant and inevitable one-upmanship that happens at the start of every new graduate program. Maybe he just has a thing for thin, dark-haired, bookish girls.

The bar was packed with undergraduate students, most of whom were probably underage, and by the time we showed up, most of them were too far gone to recognize me anyway. I came away from the counter bearing a couple of tumblers of whiskey and set one down on the wet table where Josh and I had settled.

"The bartender gave me the most awful look," I yelled above the din, laughing. "I don't think he usually pours well whiskey into anything other than plastic cups of coke. Should have ordered shots."

"Well, we'll take them like men," Josh said, lifting his glass, and we clinked them together before downing them. It tasted awful and burned like fire down my throat, but our eyes met across the table and before I knew it, he had slid around to the other side of the booth and was sitting next to me, his leg pressed warmly against mine. "If we're going to discuss your life tonight," he said into my ear, "We're going to have to be able to hear each other."

I laughed at him and told him to go get round two, and when he came back, he was carrying two beers and two shots. "This is how the alcoholics do it, they tell me, and since I'm a graduate student, I'd better get started on the long and storied tradition of efficiency in drinking!"

We took the shots, and they were even worse than the first round, but I could feel my sobriety being slowly tugged away, inch by inch, as I chased it with equally terrible beer. "This is some date," I said, my mouth brushing against his ear, "Next time maybe we can drink something a little more palatable."

"Who said it was a date?" he grinned, and soon headed off to pick up round three.

We got drunk much more quickly than we should have before he finally asked the question. "So, Sarah, what is it about you that brought you here to study fairies and gods?"

"When you say it like that, it sounds stupid."

"Well, explain to me why it isn't."

Normally this would have made me feel defensive, but my head already felt a little bit too heavy for my body, and everything seemed at least twice as funny as it had before the drinks, so I indulged him. "I'm interested in the distinction between our world and whatever the next is. Whatever else is out there. I want to cross over."

"So you believe in this stuff," he said, his eyes dancing. "Have you had some experiences with the paranormal, Sarah Williams?"

"I don't know, but I think I might have," I said. "I had an… experience when I was fifteen, and then-"

"Hold that thought right there," he said. "We're out of cheap beer and terrible whiskey again. You can tell me about it when I get back with reinforcements."

* * *

The next thing I knew, I woke up to a dry mouth, heaving stomach, and splitting headache. Pressing fingers to my temples, I tried to sit up in bed, but the room spun.

It wasn't my room.

I was lying in an unfamiliar bed, my jeans and sweater still on, and I was uncomfortably hot, my clothes damp with sweat. I eased myself more slowly into a sitting position and tried to keep my stomach from rebelling completely. A long, unhappy groan floated out of my lungs on sour breath.

"Oh, hey," he said, poking his head in through the door. "Don't freak out. I promise my intentions are only the best. I brought you toast! And Advil! And I ran down to the gas station and got you a Gatorade, so I hope you don't hate orange flavor. It was what my mom always got me when I had the flu. Old habits."

I was still clutching my head, my fingers pressed tightly against my scalp, because my head hurt fit to burst. He took a few cautious steps into the room as I looked around. The bed was just a mattress on a box spring, no frame. A pile of wrinkled, worn clothes lay on the ground next to the bed, and a pile of reasonably freshly-laundered clothes sat in a hamper. A few books were strewn around the room, on the bedside table, on the dresser, on the floor, but otherwise the room was pretty spartan.

"Don't worry," he said, pressing the pills into my hand. "I promise. Garden-variety generic painkillers, butter on toast, the Gatorade's still sealed. Wouldn't even consider drugging you after what we already did to ourselves last night."

I snapped the seal on the bottle with my wrist, tossed the pills into my mouth and washed them down with the tiniest sip of Gatorade. A wave of nausea swept over me and my head pounded, but I kept it down. "I guess I can't keep drinking like I just turned 21, huh?"

"Age creeps up on you," he said. He looked eager to help, but he also looked like he felt nearly as terrible as I did. His eyes were puffy and he was wearing a pair of pajama pants and a white t-shirt. "Never thought I'd feel so old at 23, but I guess anyone can drink enough shitty whiskey to earn himself the greatest hangover of his life."

"This is your place, then?" I asked.

"Yeah. Don't judge too hard. I just moved in a few months ago, and I didn't realize that I basically own nothing until I got here and fit all of my stuff into about two percent of my living space. I don't need much, but then again, I didn't think I'd have you here last night."

My eyes narrowed as I took a bite of toast.

"Oh, no! No, I just put you to bed in your clothes last night. I slept out in the recliner in the living room. No funny business, I swear." He held his hands up, palms toward me.

"Well, as long as you swear," I said, offering him a little half-smile. "I should get home, though. I'm dying for a shower and a tooth-brushing and a change of clothes."

"I'll walk you! I was trying to figure out where you lived last night, but between the two of us, we couldn't put more than two sentences together, so I just walked you back here."

"My knight in shining armor," I quipped, managing to stand. I swayed slightly.

"I hope you'll let me take you out again sometime," he said. "I think we've broken the ice well enough by now. We're doing this all backwards, you know. I'm supposed to have to work a lot harder than this to get you to spend the night in my bed."

I didn't even blush at this, but grinned at him without missing a beat. "I think you'll find I'm not a straightforward girl, anyway."

"I've already got some idea."

We walked in companionable conversation down the few blocks to my apartment. It wasn't surprising that he should live so close: most graduate students are living on a pittance, and tend to congregate in one specific neighborhood close to the school.

"So what exactly did I end up telling you last night?" I asked him.

He looked sideways at me. "I think I'm in luck because it sounds like you prefer blonds. Though otherwise I might not entirely be your type."

"Oh, god." I buried my face in my hands. "So I spilled everything, huh? And you still want to walk me home?"

"A gentleman always makes sure a lady gets home safely. And besides, I was right about you. You do have an interesting story, and I want to hear more of it. Preferably while we're both capable of making and retaining memories."

We stopped at my door. "This is my stop," I said, "Don't stalk me. Come find me at work next week, and we can continue our conversation."

"I was thinking maybe we could talk over breakfast tomorrow. I make a mean pancake."

"No big breakfast plans, but maybe we could push it back to brunch? I'm not much of a morning person."

"Whenever you feel like pancakes, you know where to find me," he said. "Seriously, come over tomorrow."

Impulsively, I leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.

"What was that for?"

"I figured if we're going to do this backwards, that was next in line. Tomorrow we can hold hands, but after brunch, I'm afraid we won't know each other anymore."

"I'll try my damnedest to re-reverse time, then. We'll work it out."

I laughed and gently closed the door as he turned to go.

* * *

I'd never really given much thought to relationships before, but I had to admit that it was nice to have a boy look at me the way Josh did. He was transparently fascinated and infatuated with me, and when his eyes went soft - which was often - I could lose myself in them. After perfectly average pancakes on Sunday, which he whipped up from a box of mix, we walked around the campus. As I'd promised, I let him take my hand, and our fingers interlocked. His hand was huge and warm around mine, and the cool October air didn't bother me so much after he let me wear his scarf.

At some point, I must have let him re-reverse time on me, because at the end of the day, he pressed a chaste kiss to my lips and I smiled up at him. I explained the Underground, my misgivings about whether or not it was a dream, Toby's mysterious health issues, and my inability to figure out how to return.

"Doesn't sound like a place you'd want to go back to," he said, and I agreed.

"It sounds kind of childish and stupid, but it felt so sinister. I can't shake the feeling that whatever happened there is the key to Toby's sickness." Thinking about it often made my eyes well up, and today was no exception. I dabbed at them with a tissue.

"Listen, Sarah, you can't blame yourself. It probably has nothing to do with you."

"You don't believe me," I said flatly. "I guess I couldn't expect you to. The story makes me sound crazy, and the fact that I've been holding onto it for eight years doesn't help."

He frowned and tugged me closer. "I know we're in the middle of a whirlwind romance right now, but I want to help you, and if that means assuming that your story about the labyrinth is true and figuring out how to wrangle your goblin king to save your little brother - again - then that's what I'll do."

"I want to show you something," I said, and led him up the stairs to my apartment door. He followed as I entered the studio, hung my coat on a hook and walked over to my dresser. In a little wooden bowl, there sat a small crystal sphere. I picked it up delicately, cradled it in my palm. "I brought this back with me after I rescued Toby. It was an accident, but here it is."

"One of his magic crystals, huh?" Josh asked, his deep-dimpled grin spreading. He reached for it, and I let him take it from me.

"Don't laugh. It isn't funny. I don't even like to touch it, because sometimes I think I see things in it."

He peered at it. "It's heavier than I expected." Holding it in two fingers, he brought it right up to his eye, and I could see his pupil and iris magnified in the curve of the crystal.

"I thought he wanted me to have it, but he's never answered me when I try to talk to him."

"Hey!" called Josh, "King! You in there! I'm holding one of your balls! Come talk to us, we need to strike ourselves a bargain for the young master Toby's soul!"

"Stop!" I hissed, grabbing the crystal from him. "It's not funny! Don't mess with him. I'm not prepared to deal with him if he shows up."

"How do we get ready?"

I could tell he still didn't really believe me, but it was a game to him and he was intrigued. I set the crystal back in the little bowl, cushioned on an old handkerchief, and as I turned away, I thought I saw a flicker in its depths. The cursed thing was forever catching my eye and then refusing to spill any of its secrets, so I didn't think twice about it.

"I don't know," I admitted. "There's not exactly a how-to book for it. How to Solve the Labyrinth, Twice!"

"Hmm," he said, and then, "Speaking of, have you looked into Theseus and the Minotaur?"

"Are you joking? The Greek myth specifically centered on a monster in a labyrinth, to which parents lost their children because of a vengeful king, and you ask if I've looked into it? Of course I've 'looked into it.' I could write my thesis on it. I've been over it again and again, and the best I can do is the surface similarity. Labyrinth and labyrinth."

He shrugged. "Just trying to help. Only story I know where the hero vanquished a monster after solving a labyrinth. Only story I know that's specifically about labyrinths."

"I know, I'm sorry. It's just that Greek mythology doesn't really offer many clues to build a return around. It's practically history. There aren't any magic words to take me there."

"There aren't any magic words to take you anywhere, Sarah," he said, "That's the problem."

* * *

The remainder of our fall semester passed in classes, in books, in libraries where we huddled together over faded pages, in our apartments, in papers written and exams taken and nights out at rowdy bars, where we sat in the corners and discussed my labyrinth, my brother, and my king. Having a confidant made me feel less unhinged, and having a partner in my research made my work feel less futile. Having a lover made me feel less alone.

And if, sometimes, on nights that he took me into his arms and into his bed, I found myself picturing another face, fair-haired and blue-eyed, let it nudge me over the recalcitrant edge, I always followed by hiding it, pushing it deep down inside myself, down into a lockbox in a quiet corner of my mind where nothing could disturb it.

After my final fall exam, I ran to intercept Josh as he left his. "How does it feel to have your last exam done?" I asked him, and he ran his hand across my face, leaned in and kissed me.

"One semester down," he said when we parted, red-cheeked and starry-eyed. "Let's celebrate."

I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear and adjusted the scarf that was keeping the wintry air from slinking down beneath my collar. "With snow angels?" I asked, indicating the unbroken white plains of the quad.

"With beers!" he answered, but scooped me up into his arms and deposited me unceremoniously into the snowbank at the edge of the path anyway. I squawked at the ice that crept between my coat and my pants, but laughed anyway and spread my arms back and forth until he relented, holding out a hand. I grabbed it, used it to haul myself up, and surveyed my work.

"Solid angel," I said, worming my wet glove under his scarf to plaster it against his neck. He yelped. "Fair's fair. How about those beers?"

When we were seated in a booth, the snow that had crusted in my hair dripping uncomfortably down my back, he took my hand from across the table. "So, about Project Ariadne."

"I told you not to call it that," I said. "If he's listening in from somewhere out there, he won't like it. It's trite."

"It's clever," he said. "He deserves a little indignation. Eavesdropping is terrible manners. And don't you think it's time we gave it a shot? We've been talking about it for six weeks."

"I've been thinking about it for eight years, Josh. We can take our time. Anyway, Karen wants to meet you, and I think you should come to dinner soon. Spend a couple of nights at my place, then go home for Christmas. It'll be a change of pace for you, I can get Karen off of my back about dating a nice guy, you can meet Toby-"

"I'm sold. When do we leave?"

"Tomorrow," I said, grinning at him. "I'm driving back in the morning and you can follow me if you're interested in a couple of home-cooked dinners and meeting the famous invalid."

"Guess that means we're not having many more beers tonight," he said, downing the remainder of his.

"Guess not. Are you packed?"

"As packed as I'll ever be."

We returned to my apartment, tipsy and laughing and tugging at each other's hands. I tripped on the first step and he caught me, his hands around my waist, then he bent his head to mine and kissed me. "One for the road?"

I opened the door, ushered him in without even turning on the lights. "We won't be sharing a bedroom when we get to my dad's place, so we'd better have at least one."

He undressed me, slowly, outerwear discarded by the door, trail of clothes to the bed, and by the time he pushed me back onto the mattress we were both naked, reaching for each other. He palmed my breast; I shuddered against him and ran my hands into his hair. When we finally moved together, it was perfect.

* * *

The sun had just risen when Josh and I locked up our respective apartments, loaded a suitcase or two into the backseats of our respective cars, and set out on the road. The drive to Dad and Karen's took a little more than two hours, and though snow lay thickly on the ground, the highways were clear and mostly dry beneath the too-bright winter sun.

Karen and Dad came walking out to meet us when we pulled into the driveway, their coats zipped up to their throats, hands in pockets, rosy cheeks. Dad has salt-and-pepper hair these days, and I tease him about it mercilessly though privately I think it looks sort of dashing.

"Hey there, old man silver," I said, hugging him tightly.

He just shook his head and, with a little smile, said, "Just proof of my wisdom and mortality. You know who put them there, don't you, Sarah?"

"Couldn't have been me," I said, "Must've been some higher power."

Karen kissed my cheek. "Good to see you, darling."

I heard Josh step from his door, his feet crunching in the salt sprinkled liberally over the driveway. "Dad, Karen, this is Josh. Josh, meet my parents." It took me a long time to welcome Karen into the specific fold of parenthood, but she and I have grown close over the years, bonding over hours spent at bedsides and in waiting rooms. She's always meant well, and she doesn't hold the angst of my teenage years against me.

Dad shook Josh's hand, his gaze appraising. Karen gave him a hug. I could see that dimpled smile I loved so much putting them at ease. "It's great to meet you two," he said. "Thanks for hosting me for a couple of nights. I can't wait to meet the Tobester."

Dad took my bags, and Josh carried his own, and Karen linked her arm through mine as we walked into the house. "He's very handsome," she whispered in my ear. "And charming. Not bad for your first serious boyfriend."

"Who says he's my first serious boyfriend? Maybe I just know which ones will be parent-approved."

She laughed. "I roasted a chicken for a welcome lunch and it should be out of the oven soon. I hope you'll be hungry."

"Sarah!" Toby stepped carefully down the last few stairs and then wrapped my legs up in a hug. He's almost ten now, but he's short for his age. "Mom says you're home for Christmas! Did you bring me anything?"

"I haven't had time to shop for you yet," I laughed, dropping to my knees so that I could hug him properly. "But don't worry, I'll get you the best Christmas present you've ever seen."

"What is it?" he asked, excitement dancing in his eyes. I ruffled his dark blond hair.

"That would be telling, wouldn't it, Tobe? Gotta keep some surprises."

"Hey Toby, I brought you something," Josh said, coming up behind me and dropping his hand on my shoulder. "Here."

Toby extended pale fingers to take the small, newspaper-wrapped box, looking curiously up at Josh. "Who are you?"

"I'm Josh, and I'm crazy about your sister, too, so I think we'll get along great," he said, and Toby beamed at him.

"You brought me a present?"

"Don't get too excited about it. It's not the best Christmas present ever or anything. I didn't want to steal Sarah's thunder," he said, nudging my chin with his fist. I mock-glared at him. "But go ahead and open it up."

Toby peeled the paper from the box to reveal a Lego set that, once assembled, would be a red dragon - flame-breath included. His little mouth made an o of surprise, and then he gave Josh a hug. "Cool! Thank you!" he cried, "I love dragons!"

"He loves dragons," Josh said to me. I couldn't help but laugh as he slipped his hand into mine. "See, I do listen to you. Sometimes."

"Now I have to top your dragon-gift. Thanks a lot."

Josh slid right into the family at lunch, as if he had always been a part of it. Karen was thrilled that he wanted to help set the table and then wanted to help do the dishes, and Dad was impressed with his manners and the way that Toby had taken to him. I explained what my last semester of school had entailed to Dad and Karen, and Toby, for his part, picked at the food on his plate, too excited to talk about Lego sets with my boyfriend, who was more than happy to oblige.

Many naps were taken after lunch; Josh and I settled on the couch, snuggling into each other to doze off in the afternoon sunlight, while Toby retired to his room. Karen gently woke us for dinner, and then we watched a movie, the five of us together faintly illuminated by the white lights strung around the Christmas tree.

"Time for bed, Toby," she said, lifting him off of the couch. "It's been a long and exciting day for you." He didn't protest, but laid his little head against her shoulder as she took him upstairs.

* * *

I woke to the sound of Toby having a coughing fit. I heard the opening of my parents' door as they went to him, soothing him in low voices as he sobbed between fits of wet, wracking coughs. Josh stole into my room, silent as a shadow, and sat beside me on my bed, curling his body around mine. He looked into my face and wiped tears away from my eyes with his fingers.

"It's not your fault," he whispered. "You have to stop blaming yourself."

"I don't know how to stop blaming myself." I listened to the slow subsiding of Toby's crying, the hushed voices of Dad and Karen, the quiet footsteps back down the hall.

"Let's try it. Right now, let's try it."

"What?" I looked at his face, and he was solemn and stoic. He wasn't teasing me, he was dead serious. "You really want to try to summon the goblin king? You don't even believe in him."

"Your brother's a sweet kid," he said, "And I can't watch you do this to yourself for the rest of your life. Let's try."

I reached into my suitcase where it lay, unzipped and propped open, by the side of the bed. My fingers closed around a couple of chains, and then found a knife where it was wrapped in a dish towel. I brought them up to rest on the bed. Iron. "I don't know if he's fae," I said, "I don't really know anything about him at all. But it's better to be safe, isn't it?" Then I plucked the crystal out of the suitcase where it was tied securely in a handkerchief.

We looked at each other, eyes large and scared, before I rose from the bed and unlatched the window. It fell slightly open and frigid air curled through the room. I took a breath. Josh watched me, waiting; I could see him clenching his jaw. In the witching hour, it was impossible to maintain the levity that infused our sunlit efforts. A chill that was unrelated to the temperature outside settled over us.

I cleared my throat. "I wish the goblins would come and take me away, right now." My voice shook. We waited.

Nothing.

No different than it had ever been. I had said the words so many times that they'd worn a groove in my tongue, and he had never come for me, no matter how loudly I screamed them or how softly I whispered them. Still, it felt different in the room. Something was here. Something was observing.

"I wish the goblins would come and take me away, right now," I repeated, a little bit louder, my voice steady and defiant. A breeze pushed the window open further. An owl hooted out in the night. I shivered and Josh came up beside me, wrapping his arms around my torso.

"I wish the goblins would come and take you away, right now?" he said, uncertain, his tone just a hair shy of facetious reverence.

The window flew wide to crash against the wall. I gasped. His arms around me tightened, and I could feel his heartbeat racing with mine, jumpstarted by a painful dose of adrenaline.

"How fascinating."

We whirled as one, my hands grasping at Josh's fingers.

"Quite novel, a runner enlisting a lover to aid in her return."

Too tall, too thin, otherworldly, draped in robes of perfect black, collar curling around his face, armor peeking through the opening of the robes. His mild expression chilled me to the bone. I felt Josh's face go slack against my shoulder. It was all real. It had always been real, all of it.

I was relieved and I was petrified and I had never felt such a contrary stirring of emotion before.

"Are you going to take me?" I asked, mustering up all of the defiance I could find.

"Oh, Sarah," he purred, "I would like nothing more than to… _take_ you." His tongue wet his lips, hunger rippling in his eyes.

Color rose in my cheeks. Josh stiffened, and I could feel anger warring with disbelief through his tense frame.

"Unfortunately for us both, you have already run my labyrinth, and you may not return. You are a rarity; most runners never make it back to a position from which they might request a second run, and those who do would never consider it. Was it not enough to escape with your brother's life?"

"He's not the same as he was before. You took something from him," I choked.

"I may have, or he may have left it," he replied. "It's a hazard of the whole unsavory business. One rarely emerges from the Underground unscathed. You certainly didn't."

"He was just a baby! He couldn't even walk or talk! You can't hold him responsible for leaving part of himself behind!"

"Rules are rules."

"Wish me," said Josh, urgently. "Wish me, and I'll go in after Toby." Interest flickered deep in the goblin king's eyes, bringing them to life.

Though my mind was blank, I found the words, guilt roiling within me at the prospect of wishing him into enemy hands. "Then I wish that the goblins would come and take him away, right now."

"Sarah, Sarah, Sarah," he said, and his laughter was low and wicked. "You've had your wish granted already. Your time has come and gone. You'll have to do better than that to save the child."

Josh looked at me, turned me to face him. "I'm going to go," he said. I looked over my shoulder at the cruel smile that smoldered on the king's face.

"Wait," I begged, "Wait. Don't say it." And I scooped the iron off of the bed, looped the simple chains around his neck, pressed the knife into his hand. He kissed me, long and slow and deep, and I responded in turn, his warmth against my body, the muscles in his arms tensing where I held them, my fingers splayed across his skin.

I slipped the crystal into the pocket of his pants. "Be safe," I whispered against his lips, "Be smart. Come back to me."

"Sword and thread," he murmured into my mouth, and then he withdrew his lips, pressed me against himself, and said, "I wish the goblins would come and take me away, right now."

His comforting, protective arms were gone, and I was alone. The sharp scent of ozone burned in my nose. I opened my eyes to see the king standing before me, imperious and amused and radiating dangerous, angry power.

"The labyrinth isn't as welcoming as it once was," he said. He reached out, drew his fingers across my cheekbone. "We are a jealous people. Say your prayers, Sarah."

He stole an icy kiss from my trembling lips, and then he, too, disappeared, leaving me to push the window shut with frozen fingers, fumbling with the latch, and then crawl into my cold, empty bed, shivering and wondering if I would wake up in the morning to find it had all been a dream.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** As always, feel free to come find me on AO3 (Exulansist there, too) for rambling author's notes and easier interaction. We'll make a party out of it.


	2. Hemechoria

"So," said Josh, keeping his tone light and conversational. "This is the labyrinth."

"It's difficult to process when you didn't believe in me until five minutes ago. I understand. Take your time."

His hair stirred gently in the wind, blown around his face as if he were a model in the world's gentlest wind tunnel. Josh was struck by just how closely he resembled one of those Japanese cartoon characters, over-the-top hair and darkly accentuated eyes and tall, ridiculously slender body. He didn't like it; Jareth gave him the creeps, and not just because he was clearly lusting after Sarah. He radiated danger. And lechery.

"I've already got the rundown," he said, looking out across the landscape in this queer dusky half-light, grey maze twisting away from him for what seemed like an eternity. A castle rose in the distance, dark and ominous. "It's a bit of a cliche, though, isn't it? All of this? A little over the top?"

"I don't do things in half-measures," Jareth said dryly.

"So, thirteen hours to find the castle, yadda yadda yadda, bring back the child and we're done?"

"Not quite," said Jareth, and his eyes glittered. "When Sarah challenged the labyrinth, she played a child's game. Thirteen hours and safe passage home, regardless of the outcome. Yours is a hero's challenge: no time limit, and if you succeed, you're free to leave - as long as you can find your own way out."

"No time limit on the escape, then, either, I hope," said Josh.

"None whatsoever, but do try to remember that too much time in the labyrinth will take its toll on even the soundest of mind. Eye on the prize, young man. May I call you Theseus?"

Josh was startled enough to bark a laugh. "So you do keep an eye on us, huh? My name is Joshua, but you can call me whatever you want as long as you stay out of my way."

"I can assure you, Joshua, that I will not be barring your way through my labyrinth, but try not to not make the mistake of assuming that the absence of my personal adversarial pushback will make this journey any easier for you. The labyrinth is ancient and wild, and it knows you perhaps better than you know yourself."

Josh barely managed to keep himself from snorting, but Jareth noticed the quirk of his lips that signaled barely-contained laughter, and an answering smile spread slowly across his pale face. "I only warn you because I believe in making fair deals. Feel free to disregard my advice. By all means, throw caution to the wind. I love nothing more in a hero than a deliciously ironic fatal flaw."

"The fae don't play fair. You don't think very highly of me at all if you think I'll believe a word you say."

"The fair folk are nothing if not just, Joshua, but the devil is in the details," he said, the unsettling smile still locked in place. "But you're correct to say that I don't think much of your deductive reasoning. Time is moving, dear boy, and you with it. Though you fail to appreciate it, I will reiterate my advice: though you have time aplenty, it would be wise to make best use of it while you still can."

Then he was gone, blinking soundlessly out of existence, and Josh was left to pick out a path between the dunes that should take him to the entrance. "That sounds an awful lot like a time limit to me, you big fairy," he grumbled. "And I don't even know what the terms of my deal are. Sounds like I can leave whenever I want, with or without Toby."

The landscape was barren all the way down to the maze where what little grass grew was shorn close to the ground, stubbly and more grey-brown than green. An odd buzzing rang in his ears, reminding him of too-hot summers when the cicadas crawled through the earth from their underground resting places, but he saw no winged creatures, bugs or otherwise.

A dry fountain sank into the ground just in front of him, its statues broken and blanketed in dirt and dust. If the whole maze was going to be in this state of disrepair, he'd be in more danger of contracting a serious case of tetanus than of the goblin king's machinations. The parched basin of the fountain was cracked and dark with soil, and the sight of it made Josh lick his lips and wish for water. Maybe this hero's quest was going to consist mainly of psychological warfare.

He smiled wryly at the direction of his own thoughts. Of course it would be psychological warfare, and probably more sinister than a pair of talking doors that refused to yield their secrets even if their logic puzzle was solved correctly.

 _All I can think is that maybe it was simpler than I expected, back then,_ he remembered Sarah saying. _Each time I had to make a decision, I went right instead of left. Maybe it doesn't matter how I answered the riddles. Maybe you go straight as far as you can, and when you have to choose, go left._

 _The path less traveled?_ he'd asked, grinning at her, and she'd smacked him with that odd little half-smile that was so clearly a shield for some other emotion that she still didn't trust him enough to reveal.

 _I know you still don't believe me about any of this, but I'm just thinking out loud. I don't know what the path less traveled was, but neither did Robert Frost, if you'd ever bothered to read the rest of the poem. Either I chose wrong, or no matter what I chose, it would have been wrong, and I wouldn't put it past him. But if I ever get back there, I'm going to go straight and when I have to choose, I'm going to go left._

He scratched an itch on his shoulder blade, then shrugged to himself, tugged gently at the small iron chains hanging around his neck to reassure himself of their presence, and stepped forward to look at the one long, unbroken outer wall of the labyrinth.

 _It's tricky. He's tricky_ , she'd said. _Getting into the labyrinth is the first real challenge, and it won't be any easier after that. But he won't be able to fool all of my senses. I'll find my way in._

Josh remembered the determination that had cleared the clouds from her features, the stubborn slope of her nose, the way her eyebrows drew down just slightly, the glint in her green eyes that gave the goblin king's steely gaze a run for its money. And he reached out to trail his fingertips along the wall, prepared to walk as far as he had to until he found the entrance, only to find that the wall before him was insubstantial.

Though he hadn't even shifted his weight forward, it threw him off-balance to watch his hand continue to move forward past where he'd expected solid stone, and he brought his hand back to rub at his eyes to try to clear the illusion, to bring back his depth perception. When he reopened his eyes, he stood before and below an arch in the wall that not been visible before, opening into the maze, whose floor was cluttered with debris and gnarled, overgrown roots.

"Well," he said, and the sound of his voice was alien to him in this place, "I guess this is the beginning."

* * *

I woke as I had fallen asleep: shivering and unsettled. My face was buried in a familiar-smelling t-shirt, my fists balled in the soft material. Though I was sure I had closed and latched the window last night, it was standing slightly open, and my feet dropped into the cold December air that blanketed the floor as I slipped from the bed to press it shut and lock it.

I turned and looked at the room with Josh's shirt still held in one of my hands, and then I tore through the suitcase, looking for the knotted handkerchief with the crystal, for the iron that I'd sheepishly gathered, grasping at straws for protection upon my possible return to the Underground. I'd spent sleepless nights sanding down the rust on the knife until it gleamed like silver in the moonlight, and it was not here. I would not have forgotten them; I would not have lost them.

I felt an uncomfortable terror draw a cold finger down my spine as I stepped quietly into the hallway and pushed the door to the guest bedroom open.

Contrary to my fervent hoping, the bed was empty, the sheets folded neatly back as if he had even been conscientious in getting up to comfort me in the middle of the night. I walked to the bed, sat down on it, slid my hand across the mattress to look for warmth - maybe he'd just gotten up for the bathroom. Maybe he was in the shower. Maybe he got up to go for an early morning run - but the sheets were cold.

I pressed my hand to my mouth, prepared to stifle a scream that never came, and instead I zipped his suitcase shut and hauled it downstairs, snatched his coat from the front closet and reached into the pocket to find his car keys. I slipped into his sneakers and walked out to the car, shoes squeaking on freshly fallen snow, and then I threw the suitcase into the trunk and hopped into the driver's seat. The car started easily and quietly, and I threw a silent prayer of thanks skyward to anyone who might be listening, followed by another when the heat began to kick in.

I drove the car to a nearby covered garage, grabbed a ticket at the gate and tossed it into the glove compartment - I'd deal with the parking cost when my boyfriend came back from a parallel dimension, so this was really the least of my worries - and then I caught the bus home. I was freezing the entire way, because although I'd grabbed my boots, I'd forgotten to bring my own coat and I left his in his car, and by the time I got home I was sure that my frozen arms were about to part ways with my torso.

The house was still dark and quiet, and I tossed up another thank-you that Dad and Karen had slept late this morning as I tiptoed up the stairs. Toby sat at the top, pale and thin and dozing against the banister, his arm slung over a little oxygen tank that ran tubing into his nose, a testament to the violence of his late-night episode, and I could see the veins in his eyelids before his eyes flickered open to land on my face.

"Rough night, huh, Tobe?"

"Where's Josh?" he asked me.

"Hello to you, too. Josh had to go take care of some stuff," I said, and convinced myself that I wasn't really lying. "I'm sure he'll be back later. I was just saying goodbye to him."

Toby's face fell, and I sat beside him to give him a hug. "Don't look so upset, Tobe! I'm still here! We'll have fun without him!"

He managed to smile up at me, and my conscience loosened its death grip for long enough to allow me to leave him sitting there forlornly at the top of the stairs and hop into a hot shower that still somehow failed to exorcise the pervasive chill that was settling heavily in my bones.

* * *

It had been surprisingly easy going, if the difficulty was to be judged by the lack of obstacles he'd encountered rather than the amount of walking he'd done. Josh looked back and could barely make out the arch he'd passed through some time ago to enter the labyrinth, and since then he'd been repeating _straight and then left_ under his breath, right foot stepping on _straight_ , left on _left_.

It was quiet here. Every so often a small breeze would tangle around his feet in gentle eddies, sweeping a couple of dry, brittle leaves with it in oddly predictable patterns. They disintegrated beneath his feet with satisfying crunches. He hadn't been able to spot any trees, at least not yet, but the question of the source of the leaves and the roots didn't bother him nearly enough to warrant dwelling on it. He evidently had nothing but time to get to the center.

Surprisingly - or at least Josh had found himself surprised - the maze hadn't been particularly maze-like yet. The sky was still grey, and he was resigning himself to the reality that time simply would not pass while he was here - or it would pass, unmetered by any of the usual signs. Maybe he'd reach up in a few hours and find that a patchy beard had sprouted across his face. He smiled to himself and patted the pocket where the knife was wrapped in linen. Having a weapon in this eerie place - even a small one - granted him a welcome sense of security.

The labyrinth was spread out invitingly before him, and the corridor went on straight for as far as he could see. Not for the first time, he wondered whether or not walking straight into the labyrinth would take him to the center.

"Come on, Sarah," he muttered. "Help me out here. How do I know I'm going the right way?"

 _All roads lead to Rome_. An amused voice rang in his ears, indisputably belonging to Jareth. _Or, in your case, perhaps it's Athens._

"How do you do that?" Josh asked, irritably, but his only reply was fading laughter. He scowled and kicked at a root, which snapped dryly from its anchor to skitter across the ground. Should he try to walk faster? Should he turn away from the path that was practically unrolling itself before him, lacking only a red carpet? How long would it take to travel to the castle?

When his feet grew tired, he leaned against one of the walls and peered at the sky. "This has to be a dream," he said to himself. "And a boring one, too. Maybe I'll just wait here to wake up."

"I wouldn't recommend it," said a tiny voice, and Josh looked down to see a tiny creature with a tuft of vividly blue hair peering up at him. "Not wise to wait around anywhere in here. In and out, that's what he says. But if you're dead set on it, per'aps you want to stop for dinner?"

Josh blinked, several times, the absurdity of this little thing with its myopic eyes inviting him - where? - for dinner. "No thanks, but I appreciate the offer," he said, wondering if it would be inappropriate to pat the little thing on the head, because though it was actually speaking to him, it reminded him of nothing so much as the homeliest little dog he'd ever seen. "I guess I'd better be going."

"That's right," squeaked the creature. "Best of luck to you, young man. Been a long time since I've seen the labyrinth unfold this way. Hang on to yourself."

Josh, feeling further unsettled despite the ridiculous little creature that disappeared somehow back into the nooks and crannies of the maze walls, pushed himself off of the wall and looked ahead of himself. Still no forced branch. If any path he chose led to the destination, then he really was only racing the clock, and the wager was apparently his mind against whatever remained of Toby here.

As he finally, reluctantly accepted the premise, his pace quickened, and he looked neither to the right nor to the left as he began to jog through the maze, his footfalls eerie in the silence. He went on like this until his side burned and sweat had drawn a dark patch on the white t-shirt that he was wearing, and still the maze continued straight as an arrow before him.

In fact, he'd been transported here in nothing more than the pajamas he'd been wearing when he'd gone to comfort Sarah - hours ago? last night? - and the uneven ground was taking its toll on his bare feet. He heaved a heavy sigh and took several more steps forward, gingerly, favoring the balls of his feet because his heels were already growing tender and sore, and he was still, as far as he could tell, no closer to the center of the maze.

Not much of a maze, either, given that he'd covered what was certainly several miles and had not once deviated from the path forward.

But here - as soon as he'd allowed himself to think about the progress he wasn't making, the maze shifted before his eyes, shimmering. He squinted at the space before him, trying to resolve it into focus, and felt oddly disoriented. It was writhing shadows, maybe, or the whisper of a shadow's residue. The air looked much the way that water does when disturbed, wrinkling gently ever outward and distorting everything beyond it.

Naturally, he didn't trust it. If fact, he'd go so far as to assert that he trusted it as much as he trusted the blond goblin king in his obscene leggings, and if he was given the opportunity to see how far he could throw the king, he would seize it gladly, but it wouldn't say one whit about how far he trusted Jareth, which was to say not at all, under any circumstances. The chain around his neck was strangely warm, and when he patted his pocket, the crystal that was weighing his pants down was still there.

Josh sighed. "Nothing for it. I guess it's forward or bust." And he reached out a hand to swirl his fingers in the air before him, and then, predictably, his world went dark.

* * *

When I stepped out of my very long, very hot shower with flushed skin and dripping hair, I found that my heart had lifted, if not the chill that I was afraid had settled permanently into my bones. Beyond the whir of the bathroom fan, I could just make out the sounds of Karen bustling around in the kitchen, and being home felt cozy and safe despite Josh's absence.

I rubbed at the condensation clouding the mirror with my bare hand, streaking the moisture there and leaving my reflection dappled with tiny water droplets, and I peered at myself in the little window I'd opened, considering the shape of my eyebrows.

A flash of black over my shoulder.

I pulled the towel tightly around myself, painfully aware that it was too small to offer any more than the most minimal privacy. "What is _wrong_ with you?" I snapped, then wondered why my first reaction to his presence here was irritation rather than surprise or fear or even anger with a little more bite to it.

"I wouldn't want to drop in on you if you weren't alone," he said, making a great show out of examining what would have been his fingernails if he hadn't been wearing - as always - gloves. "I'm only thinking of your best interests."

"I'm sure." I leaned back against the bathroom vanity, holding my towel in one fist around my breasts and keeping it from gapping around my thighs with the other hand. "And I'm sure it has nothing to do with my current state of dress."

"You wound me, suspecting such shallow motivations of me. I merely thought that you might like to talk, given our long separation. Has absence made the heart grow fonder?"

"I have a boyfriend," I said, the words falling flatly from my lips, and then wanted to laugh at myself. How many women had dismissed Jareth, the Goblin King, with 'I have a boyfriend'? Unlikely to be many. The juxtaposition of his more-than-human presence with the contemporary turn of phrase veered into the absurd.

He frowned. "I understand that you have taken a lover, Sarah, but do not think that I can't see through your veneer. He's a means to an end, is he not?"

"What are you trying to say?"

He appeared to reconsider his train of thought, tilting his head thoughtfully in a way that did strange things to my knees, and then he brought his eyes back to my face. "Nothing of consequence. I'm simply grateful that you found someone to make your wish and summon me. My years of being bound to silence where you are concerned have been most trying. Your Theseus has opened our door again, and I can't tell you how pleased I was to show up to grant a wish and find young, plucky Sarah all grown up but still dwelling on her time Underground, waiting for me. It bodes well for our story, and I do love a happy ending."

I didn't like that he referred to Josh as Theseus. It made me think that Jareth was in on our little inside joke more deeply even than either of us, and though I didn't know how that might manifest itself, I wasn't particularly optimistic where his intentions were concerned.

"Is Josh okay?"

"Joshua is making admirable time toward the center of the maze. Whether or not he will be able to escape after having arrived there is another matter entirely."

"Sarah! Breakfast!" Karen's chipper voice sailed into our conversation, and as it did, Jareth smirked at me.

"I suppose I'd best be returning to my royal duties," he said, "But don't worry, Sarah. I'll keep you abreast of young Joshua's progress."

* * *

"Seriously?" Josh asked no one in particular.

He was standing in front of a classroom. Probably his fifth grade classroom, if he thought hard enough about it, because the desk said "Mrs. Tomsen" on it. The colorful paper border around the cork of the bulletin board was cluttered with cornucopias and turkeys and pilgrim hats, so he supposed that it was around Thanksgiving. But students who were clearly well into adulthood were crammed absurdly into tiny chairs at tiny desks.

In fact, there was his ex-girlfriend from undergrad, glaring at him from beneath a large, floppy sunhat. And here were some of the guys who had played intramural football with him, wearing shoulderpads under faded, mismatched jerseys that made them almost twice as wide as the chairs that they were precariously balanced on.

And there was gray-haired Mrs. Tomsen sitting at her desk, writing notes on one of those ubiquitous desk-sized calendars that all elementary school teachers seemed so fond of with one of those ubiquitous felt-tipped red pens that slashed mercilessly through error-riddled homework assignments and papers. She looked up at him, and the matronly half-smile fell away from her face.

"Joshua!" she gasped, and he heard a tittering sweep across the classroom of adult students at children's desks.

He looked down.

Reflexively, his hands flew to cover his nakedness. He missed his previously out-of-place plaid pajama pants.

"Oh, I see how this is going to be," he said to no one in particular as the football guys groaned loudly and covered their eyes in ludicrous synchronization, rocking on tiny unbalanced chairs. "Well, you're going to have to do better than this. Knows me better than I know myself? Naked in front of a classroom is a common nightmare, sure, but I've never lost any sleep over this one."

He brought his hands back up, crossed his arms over his chest, and grinned defiantly at his jury of peers. "It's not much of a fearscape. Honestly, it feels like you pulled it from the nightmare primer. And I don't have anything to be ashamed of."

The girls were peeking through their fingers, giggling. Mrs. Tomsen rose from her seat and menacingly brandished a ruler at him.

"No, no," he said, "She wasn't much for corporal punishment. Parents don't go in for that much anymore. You're behind the times."

 _Psst._

He looked around for the source of the hissing, and Mrs. Tomsen closed in, snapped the edge of it against his knuckles. "Ow!" he yelled as she raised the ruler again. "Knock it off!" He grappled with the surprisingly strong old woman, trying to release her grip on the makeshift weapon.

"Don't engage," said a gruff little voice, and Josh dropped his hands. Mrs. Tomsen stood frozen, a mildly displeased expression on her face. "The more you let it work you up, the harder it is to get out."

"Who are you?" Josh asked, searching the faces of his dream classmates. "Where are you?"

"You won't be able to see me 'til you get out," it said. "That's the way it works. I'm not in the dreams, I'm in the maze."

"Okay," Josh said slowly, looking at his reflection in his old teacher's glasses. "So how do I get out?"

"There's no hard and fast rule."

"You know," Josh said, as Mrs. Tomsen resumed her onslaught with the ruler and he struggled to maintain his hold on her wrists, "That's really not very helpful. I'm currently naked and wrestling with an old woman who's trying to hit me with a ruler, so while I'm not scared, per se, I have a very serious and vested interest in busting out of here and getting back to the labyrinth."

"Every dream's different," said the voice.

"Oh, good," said Josh. "Well, how about this: I wish the goblins would come and take me out of this dream, right now."

The entire scene dropped as if someone had released a curtain, collapsed flatly around him, and he was back into the dusk of the labyrinth. A short little dwarfish creature was looking at him with what Josh thought might be amusement. His face was wreathed in deep wrinkles, his nose bulbous and his eyebrows bushy, but his eyes were blue and shrewd.

"Well," he said, "It's not gonna work every time, and it prob'ly won't ever work again, but it wasn't a bad strategy to begin with. Feisty."

Josh patted at his pockets, which, thankfully, had reappeared along with his pants and shirt, and found that Sarah's knife and crystal were still there. He took a deep breath, and then began to laugh. "It's just ridiculous. I've never even had that dream."

"Not the point," said the little man - goblin? - and shrugged.

"I don't know what the point _is._ Who are you?" asked Josh, and he had an inkling of what the answer would be.

"Name's Hoggle."

"Oh, good! You know this place; you've been here for ages, haven't you? Am I going the right way? To get to the center of the labyrinth?"

Hoggle looked at him. "Do I know you?"

"No," said Josh, and began to explain, but Hoggle cut him off, apparently used to far stranger things happening here than runners already knowing his name.

"Doesn't matter how you go, you'll get where you're goin' eventually. That's the thing about this place. It ain't about solvin' the maze. It's about keepin' yourself in one piece while you do it. What're you lookin' for? Who'd you wish away?"

"Well, no one," Josh said, slowly, "but I'm looking for… well, I guess I'm looking for Toby."

Hoggle's ruddy complexion paled. "Toby ain't here. He was collected ages ago. What d'you want with him?"

"Not all of him was collected, was it, Hoggle? Did Jareth keep something behind from him?"

Hoggle shifted nervously, and the little pouch at his belt clinked as he did. He didn't look directly at Josh, but his gaze shifted off over his shoulder somewhere. "I don't know what you're playin' at, but I shouldn't be interferin' with your run. Good luck."

"Wait! Don't you want to help Sarah?"

He had already turned away and taken several quick but short steps before he looked back over his little shoulder. "I helped Sarah once, and a fat lot of good it did any of us, her included. Would've been better for everyone if she'd lost. You should concentrate on yourself, young man. Prob'ly already said too much," he grumbled as he made his exit as quickly as he could. "If Jareth catches me talkin' to you…"

Josh could only stand and watch as Hoggle rounded a corner, his anxious muttering audible for only a few more seconds before that, too, was gone.

"This place is so weird," he said to himself, shaking his head, but he hadn't expected anything less. In fact, he'd expected more. He turned to look behind himself, and the shimmering in the air was gone. Maybe the dreams were just hurdles, and once he'd crossed them, they were gone. He hoped so. Despite the unreality of the nightmare, he was having trouble ridding himself of the image of fluorescent light glinting off of Mrs. Tomsen's glasses as she approached, ruler clutched in her hand, and he was surprised by how much the memory bothered him.

Despite the uneasiness that weighed him down nearly as much as the crystal in his pocket, Josh continued on the path forward, looking neither right nor left when the labyrinth branched away from him. A scrap of scripture from one of the many Sunday mornings he'd spent sitting - fidgeting, really - in the congregation floated, unbidden, to the surface of his mind. _Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil_. Though he hadn't thought of his childhood Sundays in years, the verse somehow lent him strength and stability. Besides, if all paths led to the destination, there was no reason to think that any divergence from this plan would be any better.

And then, out of the grey gloom even as he thought it, the path ended at a set of doors, each bearing a grotesque little face above a knocker. This was familiar: it was something that Sarah had discussed in her retelling of her own journey. Had they been the riddles? Or were they something else? Did it matter? Even though she'd solved the logic puzzle on her first pass, she'd apparently chosen wrong.

But if all paths led to the endgame, what was right or wrong?

Indeed, it looked as if each of the doors would open directly onto the same path he'd been following already, but Josh had a feeling that there would be a difference between the two. Doors that opened apparently into the same space, but each a threshold into a different section of the labyrinth. Certain death, perhaps, waited behind one, but surely it wouldn't be that easy to face defeat.

He reached for the knocker on the left door, and the ugly little face opened beady, full-black eyes. "Oy there, what do you think you're doing?"

"I'm knocking," said Josh, who really had no intention of allowing the little gargoyle to speak his piece. "And then you're going to open this door for me, and I'm going to pass through, and you'll get to wait for the next person to come along."

"Oh, really?" It yawned widely, displaying a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth, and Josh pulled his hand back. "Oy! The lad thinks we're just going to let him through!"

The other gargoyle opened eyes just as beady and black as the first and grinned, smile full of pointed teeth. "He does, does he?"

"That's what he says, and I'm inclined to disagree."

"You're just a placeholder," said Josh, frustrated. It wasn't supposed to be this difficult. If he could go around the doors, he would, but the path had ended here and he didn't like the idea of backtracking more than a few paces. He'd seen things shift out of the corner of his eye already. "Let me through."

"We've only just begun to have our fun," said the second gargoyle. "You've got to offer us something, and then we'll let you pass."

"What do you want?" he asked. "I don't have much of anything to give you."

"It's not material possessions we're interested in," said the first, with a nasty twist to his mouth. "We just want some of your time, but you have to make it worth our while."

Josh took a slow, deep breath and tried not to let anger rise up into his voice. Arguing with a pair of door knockers hadn't made his list of priorities for this trip, but here he was, talking nonsense with two wrought-iron gargoyle heads. "How do I make it worth your while?"

"That would be telling," they said in unison.

"I just want to go through this door," he said, indicating the left door. "I don't want to give you anything, and I don't really think you want to take anything except the one commodity I know I can't spare because everything in here wants to keep me from the end. And I think if I knock on your door, you'll have to open it for me." He reached for the knocker again, and the gargoyle growled low in its throat.

"The end is never what it seems," said the right gargoyle, looking terribly amused. "And don't forget that you have to find your way out. We know what this version of the labyrinth means. Even if you make it to the center, 'the end' means finding your way back out, and that's never a small task. Have you considered, young man, that perhaps you don't have to go all the way in to come back out?"

Josh, distracted by the gargoyle on the door that he didn't want to pass through, suddenly felt teeth sink into his finger. _Like a hot knife through butter,_ he thought, and wrenched his hand away from the hateful little thing, watching blood slowly bead and then stream in thin rivulets from the tiny puncture marks.

"Ah, well," it said, licking its lips with a stomach-turning smacking sound. "That's just as good as time, corrected for the exchange rate. You may continue." And its door swung open, one extended creak until it stopped, and Josh stepped over the threshold, giving the knocker a vicious little rap anyway.

He smiled as the creature's offended "Oy, let you through, didn't I?" followed him as he continued further into the labyrinth, but his smile fell from his face as quickly as the voice faded behind him. It all seemed much too easy.

 _It's such a strange place,_ Sarah had said. _I thought that it would be full of wrong turns and riddles, but I never found myself at a dead end and every time I thought I'd solved a puzzle, it was turned around on me. Most of it was old and dusty, and the goblins and things inside it all seemed more lonely than malicious. I still don't quite know what to make of it._

Maybe it wasn't wrong, but it still added to his growing sense of doubt. When would the maze become difficult? After all, he'd been told by the leading authority that Sarah's had been a child's game.

* * *

After I had slipped into a pair of well-worn jeans and a snug red sweater, seasonally appropriate with its huge grinning snowman stretching across my chest, I took the stairs two at a time to jump into my chair at the table. Dad grinned at me from above his mug, and Karen rose from her chair to cut me a generous slice of coffee cake.

"Do you want eggs, Sarah? I could fry you a couple if you wanted some protein, or something a little less festive."

"No, cake is more than fine," I replied, and poured myself a tall glass of milk.

"Is Josh a late riser?" she asked, and my hand shook, slopping milk over the edge of the glass to spatter translucently across the table.

I focused on keeping my tone light and airy and reached for a napkin. "No, he's an impossible morning person, but he had some errands he needed to run today, and he thought as long as he was out, he'd take care of everything at once. I think he actually meant to check on some things back at his apartment at school."

It sounded so flimsy, I could actually feel panic at my own stupidity coloring my cheeks, but Karen just shook her head. "Oh, to be a forgetful college student again," she laughed. "Well, we'll be glad to see him again whenever he's finished. We didn't scare him off, did we?"

"No, not at all. He was so excited to meet everyone, and I think everyone really lived up to his expectations." I shoveled cake into my mouth, hoping that if I made a big show of chewing, no one would ask me another question about Josh at least until I had swallowed.

"Coffee?" Karen was asking, holding out the half-full pot, and I nodded, brushing crumbs from my lips with the back of my hand. Given my atrocious table manners, it was laughable that Jareth would want anything to do with me. Given the sun shining in the window and the normalcy of the milk and coffee cake and the Christmas tree in the corner with its twinkling white lights, it was laughable that Jareth even existed.

Karen filled the mug that she'd set out for me, and then pushed the sugar bowl and the little pitcher of cream toward me with a little smile. She always made such an effort to be a mother when I was around that sometimes it grated on my nerves, but this morning it was helping me in my quest to think of literally anything but the goblin king. I poured a generous amount of cream into the coffee, gave it a quick stir, and then sucked the spoon clean, burning my tongue in the process.

"Is Toby a late riser these days?" I asked. "I saw him this morning when I came back from sending Josh off. I'm surprised he didn't beat me to the table."

"Toby was up this morning? We usually don't even try to wake him until eleven. He sleeps soundly in the mornings, and it's good for him. He had a hard night last night."

"He seemed okay to me." I set my fork down, grateful to have shifted the conversation away from Josh's absence, but somehow I found myself curving the conversation back around to it anyway. _Stupid_. "He was disappointed that Josh left for a while. Maybe he was just excited to have another man in the house, and then when Josh wasn't around, he decided to get back into bed. No offense, Dad."

"None taken," Dad said. "It's going to be a long time before parents are cool to him again. We've weathered this storm once before." He smiled warmly at me, and I grinned back at him and sipped my coffee. The three of us sat in companionable silence for the rest of the meal, before Karen started clearing dishes. I helped her ferry plates and silverware from the table to the sink, and then she paused and dried her hands on the dish towel.

"It's getting a little late, and it's so rare that we have you around. I'm going to go see if I can wake our sleeping beauty so we can have some quality family time."

I was covering the rest of the coffee cake with aluminum foil, basking in the warmth still emanating from its Pyrex dish, when Karen's shrill scream split the comfortable quiet of the house.

She was calling for my father, but I beat him up the stairs by half a beat, his footsteps thundering behind mine as we raced for Toby's room. Karen stood in the doorway, and I pushed past her, shouldering her body aside to see Toby wedged between his bed and the wall, limbs bent at awkward angles, blood congealing at the corner of his purple lips.

And then it was my turn to scream, and Dad carefully pushed me a handful of steps to the side and knelt on the mattress to free Toby's body, to lay it neatly out on the bed, and he put an ear to Toby's lips and we all waited, lapsing into shocked silence. I reached out to touch Toby's hand, and it was cold but as I slid two fingers down to the pulse point, I felt the weak evidence of his clinging to life.

And I knew - I _knew_ \- that I was to blame for his sudden downturn.

I spun past Karen again, out into the hallway, and Karen didn't pay any attention to me but rather moved forward to stand with my father, and I was sure that one of them was going to make a call very soon and an ambulance would show up at the house, and I couldn't stand it.

The bathroom door stood ajar, and I walked slowly into it, closed it behind me, leaned my back against the wood. The shower was still speckled with water droplets from my shower. Toby had been fine a couple of hours ago, sitting drowsily at the top of the stairs, and now he was barely more than a corpse in his bedroom, cold and pale and barely breathing. My hands covered my face, and I wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn't come forward.

"Sarah."

His voice was mellow and comforting. I refused to look up at him. "What did you do to him?"

"I have not done anything. Far be it from me to assign blame, but this turn of events was not triggered by any action of mine."

"Are you blaming me for what's happening to Toby?" I looked through my fingers at him.

"I have never blamed you for anything."

"I'm sure that's not true," I said, but as I cast my mind back through the years, I wasn't sure at all.

"The stakes have risen," he said, moving forward and taking gentle hold of my wrists, exposing my face. "I did warn both of you."

"How very _generous_ of you," I spat. I watched his eyes travel down to my sweater, and I almost wanted to laugh at the nonplussed expression on his face. "Needless to say, I've never bothered exhausting myself to live up to your expectations of me."

"While I may question your choice of clothing, I don't ask you to live up to anything at all. You've never extended me the same courtesy."

It was surreal; I honestly couldn't believe that we were this close to discussing the relative merits of my snowman sweater while my brother lay quite possibly dying in the other room. "Bring him back, Jareth. Don't punish my brother for my mistakes."

"That's not the way it works, precious," he said, then brushed still-damp hair from my face with infinite care, "There are rules."

"Break them," I begged, but he was gone and I was alone in the bathroom and I could hear my father downstairs, barking brusque instructions into the phone.

* * *

Josh hadn't been jogging along the path for very long at all before a shimmering in the air before him signaled another obstacle, and this time he didn't hesitate before plunging into it. The weird disorientation of rapidly leaving the labyrinth for another dream faded quickly, and he found himself standing before a podium in a lecture hall. School again?

A faceless professor in a wrinkled suit handed him a paper with his name on it. Josh took it and examined it.

 _F - see me_

He sighed, more for dramatic effect than out of necessity, and one of his teeth tumbled out of his mouth into his hand with an odd clicking sound.

"Really? Failed exams and losing teeth? You're dredging the bottom of the nightmare barrel, here." Two more teeth dislodged themselves with a sick crunch and then a pop, and he let them drop to the floor. He probed the empty spots in his gums where they had once been, and the sockets tasted metallic and his tongue brushed up against sharp bone fragments.

Josh was ready to admit that the realism of it was unsettling. He shifted his weight and turned his attention back to the paper. It was a mess of slashes of red pen, and if he squinted, the paper almost looked like very dry skin, cracked and bleeding. If there had been anything written on it, it was lost now, indistinct and drowned in corrective ink.

But it was supposed to be common to be unable to read in dreams, right? Maybe it wasn't so unusual that he could only make out the failing mark, the 'see me', and his own name, printed in a toddler's shaky hand at the top of the page. The S in Josh was backwards.

"Nice touch," he said, trying to muster up a laugh, and the fourth tooth fell back instead of forward and he choked on it, hacking it out of his throat. His gag reflex triggered as it scraped along the back of his tongue, and he fell to his knees, stomach heaving. The tooth tinkled like glass as it bounced along the tiled floor.

"Excuse me, young man," the professor said, and he still had no face but he wore a pair of glasses that were large and opaque, perched on a feature that resembled nothing so much as the progenitor to a nose in some unskilled art student's clay sculpting. His mouth was entirely absent, and his voice was muffled, but the skin where his mouth should have been shifted weirdly as he spoke.

Josh had to concede that while the subject material was uninspired, the labyrinth was really making the best of a bad situation. He wiped his palms on his shirt and rose to his feet.

"I just wanted to inform you," the professor continued, and Josh looked at the half-windsor in the ugly tie at his throat rather than spend one more second looking at his non-face, "that we have recognized that the parts of this paper which weren't utter drivel were blatantly plagiarized, and we will be moving forward swiftly with your expulsion from the program. We have a zero-tolerance policy for infractions of our ethics policy."

Josh opened and closed his mouth, losing three more teeth in the process, looked at the paper in his hand with its crazily shifting symbols and red stains, and felt quite as though he had gone entirely insane.

"You've got something of mine," said a much deeper, more distinct voice in his ear, "Haven't you?"

"Jareth?" he asked, and his gums cracked and opened, filling his mouth with blood and shards of bone.

"In the flesh. Or, I suppose that's not right at all, is it?" said the voice, rich with the laughter that eluded Josh so entirely.

"Well, you've got something that belongs to a friend of mine," Josh said, blood dripping out of the corners of his mouth. _It's not real. I just have to figure out how to get out._ "Why don't we trade up and make it even?"

"So charming; I can see why she's fond of you. But no, that's not the way it works. What you have is mine, and what you search for in the labyrinth is not yours. Such a lopsided bargain would never pass muster."

And then the voice and all of its echoes disappeared as if someone had muted it from a remote, and the strange structure that it had provided his mind collapsed, and he was left with a fistful of teeth, a fistful of paper, and a mouthful of blood and bone with a literally faceless academic standing over him. Josh, for the first time, allowed himself to consider that Jareth might have been serious when he had said that this would not be a child's game.

"Listen," he gurgled, appealing to anyone who might be listening - appealing to the possible sentience of the labyrinth itself, for all he knew, "I know this is a dream. Please just let me out."

He hadn't expected it to work, but the scene folded neatly around him, and then he was standing in the greyness of the maze and his teeth were all in his mouth where they belonged and the iron chain was knotted tightly around his fist at his throat and the coppery tang of blood was only a dreamlike memory on his tongue, fading fast.

The crystal burned in his pocket, and he touched it to find its unnatural heat still bound up tightly in the handkerchief.

* * *

I sat overlooking my own empty throne room, gazing into a mysteriously dark crystal. The boy had somehow managed to protect himself from my direct surveillance, and though it was no real challenge to find him in my labyrinth, I still found myself surprised. Sarah hadn't had any knowledge of magic, regardless of however else she had proven herself capable, so how could the boy possibly be thwarting my efforts?

One of the nymphs that occasionally flocked around the outer corners of the labyrinth approached, slinking through the curtains to lay a black-gloved hand on my sleeve. "Pining doesn't suit you."

"This is not pining. It's brooding."

"Could have fooled me," she said coolly. "None of your conversations with your little Champion have gone according to plan, have they?"

"I'm impressed: not all of us so entirely entirely fail to grasp the concept that there might be gratification that extends beyond the instant. I am making appropriate progress."

"But the king shouldn't have to wait, should he?" Her voice was flirtatious, suggestive.

"Are you offering?" I asked, finally looking into her face, and she was too slow to hide the raw desire in the turn of her scarlet mouth.

"Would you accept?"

"Between the two of us, I am the one who has proven to have even a modicum of patience. What do you offer me in return for my services?"

Her dark eyes grew darker still with anger at the slight, but she shook the glossy black waterfall of hair over her shoulder and delicately removed her hand from my arm. "Why, only exactly what you want, Jareth. You satisfy my desires, and I satisfy yours. I'll deliver her heart to you on a silver platter."

"While that sounds delightful, I'm more than capable of collecting my bride without your help, and I know your kind better than to agree to the less than metaphorical delivery of my currently mortal champion's vital organ on a plate. Words have meaning, don't they, pet?"

"I'm very persuasive when I put my mind to it," she said. "Wouldn't you like me to bend her will to yours?"

"I forbid you to interfere with her. She is mine, and mine alone."

Her eyes went very flat. "I think you'll find that she doesn't see it as simply as that, Goblin King. Am I to understand that we do not have a bargain?"

"You are," I said, and banished her with a flick of my wrist.


	3. Hamartia

**Author's Note:** In the interest of full disclosure: I've bumped the rating to M for language and some (ahem) adult content, both of which may be found in this chapter and very likely in future chapters as well.

* * *

Josh had a system down, now.

Not a system to deal with the obstacles that the labyrinth threw up against him, of course. He hadn't figured out how to strategize around goblins and gargoyles and especially not around dreams that - well, he only had two data points, but the difference between the psychological effects of the first and the second had instilled a bleak sort of dread in him that, try as he might, he couldn't shake.

But he had a system to help keep him from despairing about making progress. The first step was never to think about his progress, because each time he did, the labyrinth seemed to offer him a hurdle, a sort of winking acknowledgment that it was more than happy to help him mark time in any way he liked. The second step was basically to jog until he felt like his lungs would burst, then sprint until his legs nearly gave out, and then fall back to a walk until he was sufficiently recovered to jog again.

It had been slightly more than half a year since he'd played competitive sports in any sort of organization, but he still liked to run in the mornings and join pick-up games of whatever was happening on the field behind the humanities building, and he was in pretty decent shape, and - most importantly - it gave him something to think about besides the fact that his feet were in agony every time he put one of them down. Relocating the pain to his legs and lungs proved to be a diversionary miracle.

He neared the end of another jogging leg - still muttering 'straight, left, straight, left' with each step until his lungs burned too much to expend the effort - and gasping for breath, the walls of the labyrinth towering on either side of him, cutting away every so often so that he could catch glimpses of other twisting hallways in his peripheral vision. Josh steeled himself and kicked into a sprint, and his legs screamed out with the effort.

And then suddenly there was a root there, where he knew - he _knew_ \- there hadn't been one before, and it hooked around his foot so that when he lurched forward, unable to slow his momentum in time, it wrenched his ankle with exquisite red-hot pain. He yelped as the root finally snapped, or maybe it just wriggled itself loose, as sentient as everything else seemed to be in this infuriating place, and then he landed heavily on his right shoulder. The crystal in his pocket knocked against the ground, digging into his thigh as the rest of his body followed suit, stealing away all sensation just for a second, only to return with a powerful cramp in his quad that paralyzed his entire leg.

But all of these promises of aches and bruises paled in comparison to the fact that he was skidding toward a gigantic crater in the pathway, and between him and whatever was at the end of this otherwise boring, straight road was an abyss, and he tumbled right into it and kept right on falling.

There wasn't any light, here, and apparently there was no bottom, and when he finally realized that this descent wasn't likely to end anytime soon and forced himself to open his eyes and unclench his jaw, he still couldn't see anything at all. He twisted his body in midair to look where he assumed he'd fallen from, but couldn't make much of anything out. It wasn't particularly bright in the labyrinth, but he'd expected to at least see something up there. A grey blotch of half-light, maybe.

 _I wonder what happens if I die here,_ he thought, and held the thought just far enough away from himself to be able to examine it without drowning in his own terror. He remembered reading somewhere that it wasn't the impact that usually killed people, but the fear. Cardiac arrest.

Still falling, he considered his surprising serenity in the face of death, and decided that his heart was going to keep on beating just the way it always had. _I don't think he wants me to die here. He doesn't want to win like that._

And then he was standing upright in the maze, and there was no black hole opening up in the floor before or behind him, and his leg hurt like hell and Jareth was standing there, looking very pleased with himself.

"Win like what, Joshua?"

"That was a short nightmare," Josh said, surprised to find himself out of breath. He kneaded his fingers roughly into his own thigh. "Quicker than the others. What's the deal with this place?"

"You've chosen an interesting path. That particular nightmare simply tested your mettle. You passed the test, so the dream ended."

"What if I'd died?"

"You'd have failed," Jareth said, shrugging. Josh just looked at him, but had to look away shortly. He was wearing some sort of flowy white shirt beneath a leather vest, a pair of riding boots and another pair of salaciously tight breeches.

"But you didn't want me to fail like that."

"The aftermath is more complicated for me when the hero dies, but be careful not to get too far ahead of yourself," Jareth said. "And don't give me credit for your escape. The falling nightmare is common and quick. There isn't much room for improvisation."

"Maybe the labyrinth is running out of ideas."

"You'd like very much for that to be true, wouldn't you?"

Josh paused, tapped at the pocket with the crystal, then wished he hadn't. Luckily, Jareth's attention was focused somewhere else and missed being drawn to the offending item. "What is it that I have of yours that you're trying to get me to give back?"

The goblin king, who had been looking very intently down one of the offshoots in the maze, snapped his unsettling gaze back to Josh, but said nothing. Josh found himself regretting very much saying anything at all, because he didn't want to give up the crystal. He'd begun to think of it as a last resort: he was fairly certain that Jareth would recognize his own magic immediately when he dared to use it in the labyrinth, but maybe it could serve as a sort of a compass, or a trump card.

"If it's Sarah, you should know she isn't yours and I won't be giving her back to you."

Jareth smiled, all jagged white teeth. "As if she were yours to give."

"She doesn't belong to _you_ , anyway."

"To me, with me - the distinction is murky, I'll give you that." He took three steps closer, and Josh felt more uncomfortable than he had even when he had held most of his teeth in his hand, with the goblin king leering into his face. Jareth dropped a hand on his shoulder. "But she will come back to me, because the labyrinth is calling to her."

"I thought you said she couldn't come back," Josh said, his mind going cloudy. "I thought you said her time had come and gone."

"Rules are made to be broken. She cannot come back to run the labyrinth. She may come back to rule the labyrinth." Jareth's hand tightened, putting slight, dangerous pressure on the nerve in his shoulder. His arm prickled painfully.

"She doesn't _want_ to," cried Josh. "She spent eight years trying to find a way back in, and it was just to have the chance to beat you at your own game again. She hates you so much that she has literally devoted her entire life to making sure there was nothing you could ever point to and call a victory over her, but she'd rather die than come back to you to deal anything less than a death blow."

Something darkened in Jareth's face, and the mild amusement turned stormy, making Josh forget even the pain of his leg. His hand slid inward along Josh's shoulder, as if he were about to close long fingers around Josh's throat and squeeze until his vertebrae cracked and crumbled, but then he drew back, abruptly, with a hiss, and there along the exposed skin where his glove ended and his sleeve began was an angry red weal that was patterned - like the delicate chain that ran around his neck.

"You don't like iron!" Josh crowed, and the fog in his mind cleared as Jareth took a step back. The anger was quickly clearing from the king's angular features, leaving only benign surprise in its wake.

"You're better prepared than I expected," he said, impressed despite himself. "So Sarah has been learning all these years, has she?"

Josh wasted no time in going for his pocket, the one with the knife and not the crystal. Jareth watched him with something like detached interest as he shook it free of its linen swaddling, which fell gracefully to the ground, but his eyes narrowed as Josh's fingers curled tightly around the handle.

"The chain was wise. The knife is foolish."

"Are you sure you're not saying that just because you're afraid I'm going to shank you?" Josh asked, feeling a grin spread sloppily across his face, advancing with the knife held the way he remembered from West Side Story. In retrospect, maybe not the most accurate knife-fighting stance, but he had to work with what he had.

"Fear is immaterial. You couldn't stick me with that pathetic thing if you tried," said Jareth, standing his ground but looking slightly unsettled. "But more importantly to your specific end, if you somehow managed to kill me with your iron knife, it would not help any of us in our missions. What remains of Toby will be lost to the labyrinth forever. Your hope of escape will slowly but surely dwindle to nothing as the labyrinth drives you mad. Is it worthwhile to sacrifice your greater purpose for petty revenge?"

"How do I know you're telling me the truth?" Josh asked. The knife felt powerful and thirsty in his hand; it was different down here than it was back with Sarah. The labyrinth was feeding off of it - off of him.

"You don't until you do," Jareth said, "And unfortunately for you, the surety of that knowledge will only come with my death. Not a worthwhile hill to die on, young Theseus. You are destined for so much more. Killing me here would be cheating, and the labyrinth abhors a cheat."

A breeze sighed down the corridor, and Josh was quite sure that it was the labyrinth's way of lending credence to Jareth's claim. "I don't know why I should believe either of you," he said, but bent to pick up the linen and gently wrap the knife's crude but dangerous edge. When he looked up, having replaced it in his pocket, he was unsurprised to find that Jareth had gone, and the labyrinth lay silent and empty around him.

 _Remove thy foot from evil._

* * *

I watched, with a sort of numb fascination, the rise and fall of his chest. A paperback novel spread itself across my lap, open but otherwise untouched. I'd had to crease and crack the spine to get it to lie flat, and after I'd won that minor skirmish, I'd - infuriatingly - been unable to muster up any motivation to read. I had probably dozed off at his bedside several times, but there was no real measure of time passing here, so it was hard to know how much I'd slept. The best I could do was to tally the number of times a nurse had come in to monitor his breathing and his heart rate, but even that happened so sporadically that it wasn't a particularly good benchmark.

My arm was falling asleep where it was pressed against the unyielding frame of the chair. I set the novel aside, stood, gave my hand an experimental shake - a mistake that I regretted immediately as pins and needles shot through my previously numb arm - and shuffled closer to the bed.

Toby's skin was pale and translucent; dark blue veins spidered delicately across his forehead and looked as though I could split them wide open with the brush of my fingertip. His face was tranquil, his mouth was relaxed, and his eyelids flickered every once in a while, as if he were caught in a dream - but not in a particularly bad one. Knowing Jareth, that was probably exactly what was happening, but I wasn't about to offer him gratitude for accomplishing literally the absolute minimum by allowing my comatose brother to "sleep" untouched by nightmares of his design.

I touched the gossamer strands of his hair and thought of the way they fell into his eyes whenever he was bent over some small task in deep concentration. I remembered the way his eyes had lit up when Josh gave him the gift, and I smiled. I didn't know whether or not I'd ever see Josh again, and the fear was eating away at the back of my mind, forcing me to consider a life with an invalid brother and a police investigation because my boyfriend had disappeared and his car was abandoned in a parking garage by my house with my fingerprints all over it.

My hand closed around Josh's keys in my pocket. I carried them with me because I didn't know what else to do with them, but having their reassuring weight on me at all times also somehow comforted me when I started to worry about him.

It was cold in the room. Places like these always feel cold. I went to the bathroom, more out of boredom than any real need, and when I had finished, I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself, running hot water over my hands. I didn't look like someone whose life had abruptly spun out of her control. I didn't look terrified, or sad, or even guilty. I offered myself a small smile, and then I did look sad.

The water thawed my chilled fingers, so I stood with my hands in the sink and continued to stare at my own face, which grew less familiar the longer I looked.

"She caught sight of her reflection and, entranced, neither ate nor drank until she wasted away at the water's edge."

I flinched at the sound of his voice, started to turn and then caught his eyes in the mirror. "You shouldn't be here," I hissed. "What is it with you and bathrooms? Yours is down the hall." He drummed long fingers on the tampon dispenser, and I glared at him. "Do you need a quarter?"

"This is where you're most often alone. Your champion is making progress."

"Good," I snapped, shutting off the water and bracing myself there by curling dripping fingers around the cool, probably filthy edge of the counter, my back still to him. "And when he comes back to me, we'll go right back to falling in love, and we'll live happily ever after, and I'll never have to think of you again."

"Such conviction," he said, reaching over to the paper towel dispenser and pulling one, then a second and a third from it. Somehow he freed them without ripping them, which I could never quite manage, and even though it was silly, I resented him for it - for being able to function here in the world that was supposed to be mine. He held them out; I snatched them and dried my hands, which weren't particularly warm anymore. "I hope you would still think of me from time to time even if you settled for your muscle-bound hero. Think of all the things we've shared."

"We haven't shared anything. Maybe a dance, and a room once or twice, but nothing more than that."

"Sarah," he said, his voice a low purr. "You will be my queen, and we will share a kingdom, and then you will finally cease to worry whether or not your kingdom is as great as mine. I intend to make you mistress of the labyrinth."

Queen or concubine, when he looks at me like that I can forget even Toby lying sick and still in the hospital room. He is danger incarnate, and I tremble at the thought of accepting the crown that he offers.

"I will never be your queen," I said, and the words fell like pebbles into a perfectly still lake.

His lips twitched. "I hope that you might reconsider when presented with the opportunity."

"I assure you I will not." My fingers were freezing again, and I shivered visibly, rubbing them together.

He moved closer as I watched his reflection. "Are you cold, Sarah? Is that why you linger at the mirror?"

I glared at him, but my heart thundered in my chest. I thought of Josh and the way the muscles across his shoulders and down his back dimpled when I ran my fingers across them, but then Jareth was slipping first one and then the other glove from his hands, and he reached around my body to take my hands in his.

Remembering the night he'd arrived to wintry fanfare in my bedroom had conditioned me to expect nothing but coldness from him, but his hands were warm and then my hands were warm, and then my entire body was pleasantly warm and he looked directly into my eyes in the mirror. "You need only ask, and I will warm you." His lips curled upward, and I moved to yank my hands angrily from his grasp, but then his fingers tightened painfully and I was trapped there between him and the dirty bathroom counter.

"I want you to fix my brother," I said, keeping my chin high.

"That isn't up to me."

"But it could be, if you could be bothered to think for one second about what I want instead of about what you want."

"You underestimate me," he replied. "I think of nothing so much as how to best win you over, my love." Suddenly his hands were not just pleasantly warm, but hot to the touch, and my mind began to cloud. I was just so tired, and it had been so cold at Toby's bedside, and it was late and the hospital was quiet and I could feel his arms where they pressed against me, against my arms, and the warm weight of his chest against my back.

"You should go," I said thickly, unable to look away from my face. My pupils were fully dilated, huge and black, circled with a tiny ring of green iris. I thought of Josh, his broad shoulders, his easy smile, but every time I tried to call up his face in my memory, all I could see was Jareth. In the mirror, his mouth was soft, his eyes contemplative, but where his face overwrote Josh's in my mind's eye, his eyes were wild and his smile was too large and self-assured.

"Do you truly want me to go?" he asked, bringing his lips too close to my ear. Hot prickles spread across my scalp.

"If you're not going to help my brother, I want to go back and watch over him," I managed to say, watching him closely in the mirror.

"Why, Sarah, don't you think it odd that they've let you stay at his side for so long?" He dropped his head, mouthed at the pale slope of my neck - and his mouth was so hot, a glowing ember against my skin - tearing a low, embarrassingly needy sound from my throat in response. "Won't you consider that I am trying to help you as best I can?"

I wanted to tell him that I didn't think that this was the best he could do, not by a long shot, but his words were muffled and feverish against my skin and his hair was brushing against my face and my knees were quivering here in the women's bathroom on the fifth floor of the hospital, in the ICU wing, and he was right, it was odd that they would allow me to stay at Toby's bedside for so long. So instead, when I opened my mouth, what I asked was "You did this?"

"I want you to be happy nearly as much as I want you to be mine," he said, and though the sentiment was profoundly frightening, I found myself relaxing back into his arms because I needed nothing so much as a hug after the events of the day, and he was here and warm and ethereally beautiful, even if he was to blame for everything that was happening.

"So tell me, Sarah," he murmured into my ear, "Who holds the keys to your heart?"

I turned to scold him, or maybe to cover his mouth with mine, but he evaporated as if he were never here to begin with, and I was left with my shame and guilt, my heart beating too quickly, and the warmth of him, which lingered as if to prove to me that he had been here.

* * *

Josh had found that he could shield his mind a little bit from the vicious onslaught of Jareth and the labyrinth by refusing to think about anything at all. No longer able to mark time by cycling continuously through his high-intensity interval strategy, he walked with a pronounced limp and told himself that each step was working the kinks out of the abused muscle tissue in his leg rather than exacerbating the injury. He embraced the discomfiting wobble of his ankle each time he put weight on it because it forced everything else aside, narrowing his focus to the basic sensation. He was voraciously hungry, working up a terrible appetite, his stomach empty and growling inside of him, and he welcomed the hunger as one more layer in the shield between himself and insanity. He became only his own pain and hunger.

He ran a hand through his hair and found it drenched with sweat; his white t-shirt was nearly transparent where it clung wetly to his chest, and his feet were bruised and scratched. The items in his pockets were dead weight, pulling him down, and he considered stopping, not for the first time. There were so many questions that he didn't have answers to: how much time had passed here? how much time had passed for Sarah and Toby? what lay at the center of the labyrinth?

The last question raised the hair on his arms, because he had a feeling about what waited for him at the center of the labyrinth, especially given Jareth's glee and apparent enthusiasm about Theseus and -

Well, he knew how to finish that sentence, but he didn't like the answer to it one bit.

The maze gave a little impatient shudder around him, and Josh raised his eyes to see another pair of doors obstructing his path forward. _Left_ , he thought, and reached out as he approached only to be rebuffed by a shield on the door.

Or, rather, another small gargoyle of a creature who popped up from behind the shield mounted on the door and grinned nastily at him. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Through," said Josh, pulling his hand back very quickly. Once bitten, twice shy.

"Don't you want to know more about our doors?" asked another, from the door on the right.

"No," Josh said shortly.

"Such poor manners," said the first, and Josh sighed impatiently in response. His leg throbbed. "Maybe we shouldn't try to help him. He isn't very polite. I thought heroes were supposed to be nice."

"He looks terrible. The labyrinth hasn't been very easy on him."

"I don't want to go through this whole song and dance routine. I just want you to open this door so I can be on my merry way."

"Doesn't sound like your way's been merry so far, and it's not going to get any merrier," said the first, and the second cackled. "Here's what we'll do. You can ask us a question, and we'll each answer, but only one of us-"

"-tells the truth, and the other lies," Josh interrupted, to their mutual squawk of indignation. "I know, and I don't care. I want to go through the door on the left, and you are going to let me."

The creatures didn't quite know how to respond to him, and hemmed and hawed for a moment until the one on the right looked up again. "You're sure you wouldn't rather take my door?"

"I'm pretty sure I know where your door goes."

"And how would you know that?"

"I have a friend who took your door a long time ago, and she ended up in an oubliette."

The gargoyles looked at each other for just a moment in silence, and then broke into raucous laughter that grated on Josh's last nerve. "But don't you _want_ to go to the oubliette?"

"Why would I want to go to the oubliette?" asked Josh, his interest piqued by their sudden diversion from nonsense-speak.

"Isn't what you seek hidden in the dungeons?" the one on the right asked him.

"It is?" Josh asked, the words leaving his mouth before he could bite them back, and twin smiles spread nastily across their faces.

"Then you'd best find out what's behind door number one," said the one he'd originally approached, the door on the left, and it swung open to reveal a set of stairs leading down into darkness. The sudden tunneling of the labyrinth reminded him of nothing so much as a descent into a snake's mouth, jaw unhinged and grinning emptily. He took several steps forward; there was a faint flickering in the distant darkness.

Descending the steps was an agonizingly slow process as he favored his left leg, easing himself slowly from stair to stair with his right hand pressed firmly to the wall. There was nothing to hold on to, no railing or conveniently deep groove in the wall, so he had to feel forward with his foot to the edge of the stair, and then carefully hoist his body down, leaning into the wall as much as possible to minimize the weight he was putting on his ankle.

As the shadows swallowed him, his eyes adjusted and the flickering was brighter before him. After an eternity, his foot crawled forward, toes seeking out the next cold stone drop-off to curl around, and found nothing. He shuffled cautiously forward, a step and a small hop, a step and a small hop, until he felt confident that the stairs had ended. The air down here was stale and musty, and he sneezed, once, twice, three times, and then listened to the echo as it went on forever, running into itself and turning into a growl before it faded away completely.

When he grew near enough to the light to make out the source, he was relieved to find that his suspicions had been correct, and a torch was burning brightly, there for the taking. His pace quickened slightly, enough to make better progress through the dark while still shuffling his feet along the floor to try to avoid another fall, and when he reached it, he lifted it from its wrought - but surely not iron - sconce.

The flame warmed his hand, which only served to draw his attention to the fact that he was freezing down here. Cold and dark and musty. A stereotypical dungeon. He lifted the torch to see thick cobwebs blanketing every corner that the labyrinth had to offer, and he shivered at the thought of so many spiders. What was it they fed on, down here in the depths? What living things did they entrap in their webs?

And when he came upon a shadow that the flickering light of the torch could not pierce, he straightened his shoulders, placed the torch into the nearest, conveniently-empty sconce - _the labyrinth is toying with me_ \- and stepped forward into the swirling dark.

When he opened his eyes, or perhaps when the darkness cleared, his disorientation was so severe that his knees actually gave out, and he sat right down on the ground. It was some small comfort to him that his injuries from the labyrinth had failed to follow him into the nightmare, but as he looked around himself he began to dread the dream.

He was standing in a familiar scene. A Midwestern boy through and through, the son of a hale and hearty farmer gone on to make a name for himself as an academic, Josh had grown up in cornfields just like these. "A maze for a maze?" he wondered aloud, perhaps for the labyrinth's benefit.

This field was full-grown and towering above him, but it was growing more neatly than any crop of corn he'd ever seen, so maybe the fields he'd grown up with weren't just like these after all. These stalks were too widely spaced; he could clearly see down to either end of the row, and they were brimming with golden ears of corn, yet somehow they were sparse enough that he could get a feel for the flat horizon and the vast sky beyond, which had begun as cornflower blue but was rapidly changing to an unnatural shade of green.

His stomach dropped and he became dizzy with fear, and he ran for the end of the row, knowing what he would see before he arrived and cleared the last obstacle from his vision. A sickly grey blanket of clouds roiled too quickly above him and darkened what had been a pastoral scene just a moment ago, and he watched them swirl and then dip into a funnel, and a finger, long and slender, reached down from the sky and delicately touched the ground - miles? - before him, stirring up a great cloud of grey-brown dust. It began its winding journey toward him, and Josh turned, ran for the other end of the cornfield harder than he had ever run for anything in his life, and he felt his pace slow and he struggled as if running through molasses, and if he hadn't been stricken with terror he might have been able to find a sarcastic comment for dream-running in the face of a nightmare but the fact remained that the labyrinth had waited for him to descend into its darkness, to draw closer to its center, before it reminded him that it was powerful and omniscient and _knows you better than you know yourself_ because Josh had no other fears that affected him so completely, but the fear of the natural disaster, of the twister ripping through his father's livelihood and his father's home, of picking him up and never putting him back down was the one fear that never failed to paralyze him, a phobia, _I can't even watch The Wizard of Oz, for God's sake_ , and his lungs pulled at the air, and he fought to continue putting one foot before the other as the cyclone drew nearer, and the wind whistled deafeningly in his ears.

Finally, he broke free of the strange deceleration and his body shot forward, almost outside of his own volition except that he was willing himself forward with every fiber of his being, and there before him was the end of the cornfield - he shot out of it and felt a strange sense of loss without the corn walling him in, because here he was on the flat prairie, defenseless and vulnerable, and there before him was a little red farmhouse and a big red barn, and all he could think was that the labyrinth was mocking him, because it must have known that this stereotype wasn't where he had grown up, but he ran for the door of the little red farmhouse, in its rustic white-trimmed glory, because surely there would be a storm cellar, but before he could touch the doorknob he tripped - on nothing at all, his feet never encountered any resistance at all but here he was, sprawling flat and unfairly on his stomach and the tornado was encroaching, the wind tore at his hair, ripped at his clothes, screamed in his ears, and then -

And then it was surrounding him, and it was silent - too quiet, as if that mute button had been engaged again, and the wind was gentle on his brow, and he sat up, unsteadily, and suddenly wanted to cry very badly, as if he were five years old again, terrified of the violence of the wind whistling through the fields and slapping noisily at the shutters on the house. He looked around himself and found that the storm was grey, almost purple, and surrounding him and the little farmhouse on all sides, rather like a caricature of a tornado, and he took several shaky breaths, holding his head in his hands.

Laughter.

"My dear boy, if we'd known the storm would so thoroughly undo you, we would have saved it for later," came the detested voice.

"You know that the eye of the tornado isn't a thing, right?" Josh asked, but his voice shook so that he could barely choke out the words. He bit his tongue until saliva pooled sharp and wet in his mouth.

"Would you rather we continued with realism, then?" Jareth asked, and popped into existence to stand above Josh.

The wind picked up cruelly, and Josh found himself digging his fingers desperately into the ground, plastering himself as flatly as he could to the earth as he started to feel himself becoming weightless, his body beginning to be flung around wildly, and Jareth still stood there above him, unaffected by the storm, his hair as static as if it were a perfectly still day and that terrible smile on his face, as though he were drinking in Josh's terror, and then-

Then a small hand closed around his wrist, and Jareth's smile evaporated from his face and the wind died down and the sickly greenish-grey light went out, and as his eyes adjusted to the once-familiar flickering of flame, he saw a little dwarflike goblin with a glare that was almost too large for his face and a little hand still locked around his wrist.

"Get a hold of yourself," he said, gruffly, and Josh stumbled to his feet, crying out in pain when he forgot and put his full weight onto his right leg. "Don't you wanna make it out of here with your brain intact?"

"Of course I do," Josh began, but then stopped with a strangled yell as he saw an enormous shadow hulking behind Hoggle.

Hoggle looked behind him. "Don't worry 'bout him. He's simple, but he wants to help. I needed to get here quick, so I had him shift some of the stones down here for me. Jareth'll probably murder me later, but maybe death isn't the worst end for my story."

The monster uttered a groan of despair, and Hoggle turned to him. "Calm down, Ludo. He's never cared enough to kill us yet, but we might have to visit Didymus for a while. Which might actually be worse than death."

Ludo made another sound that might have been words, but the echo of the dungeon stole the edges from them and they all blurred together. Hoggle glared at him. "Don't get so upset. I'm just kiddin'. Mostly."

"Why did you pull me out?"

"You clearly weren't gonna make it yourself. You're lucky it wasn't the last dream - then I definitely couldn't-a made it to you. You're lucky the labyrinth miscalculated."

"What?"

"Come on, you can't be this dense. The labyrinth is gonna make it harder when you get close. And you're close."

Josh couldn't decide whether he was elated or dismayed at the news.

"We can't stay," Hoggle continued. "We're rootin' for you, but we can't stay. I'm sure you understand. Good luck."

"Th-thanks," Josh managed to say as Hoggle turned and patted Ludo, who began to lumber off down the tunnel.

"Remember, kid," said the goblin-dwarf, "Jareth never makes anythin' simple. Things don't grow quite straight here. Pay attention."

* * *

"... unresponsive," the nurse was saying to Dad and Karen. "... deep coma, but the CT scans are inconclusive …"

I pressed my hands to my ears. I didn't want to hear any more, didn't want her non-diagnoses to fall like marbles into the pit of my already sunken stomach, but I could still make out the quiet sob that Karen was trying to bury in Dad's chest, and I sat there in the waiting room chair, having been momentarily ushered out of Toby's room where he lay, still and white, where I couldn't keep myself from reaching over to check his pulse every few minutes, to reassure myself that he was still warm and clinging to life.

The waiting room was empty and quiet, and Dad and Karen stopped in front of me, his eyes haunted, hers red-rimmed, to ask if I wanted to go home with them.

"No," I said, dropping my hands from my ears. "I'll stay."

"Please come home and eat something," Karen pled, her voice clogged with tears.

"I'll come home later. I want to be here right now. I can get something from the cafeteria when I'm hungry."

"I want to make dinner for you," she said, dissolving into tears, "Please let me take care of you tonight, Sarah."

Dad ushered her out, giving me a look that was half-sympathetic and half-irritated - _why won't you just come home so we can pretend our family is fine_ \- and when they were gone, I drew my sleeve across my eyes and took a deep breath.

"Jar-"

A finger was laid quietly across my lips. "Don't," she said, and I looked up to see a woman, so beautiful it was almost painful to look at her. "Don't call him."

I was so startled that I couldn't give a response, but only stared dumbly up at her, my mouth still half-open against her finger in surprise.

"You know better, Sarah," she said, and there was laughter that bled into her voice, and I hated her for it, but she moved her hand, cradled my face, and there was enough sympathy in her dark, sorrowful eyes for me to drown in it, and she drew tears from my eyes as surely as she drew my head to her breast and held me, tenderly. I sank into her embrace. "He will have no help to offer you. This is a game to him. Your brother is a game to him. _You_ are a game to him, and you should not allow him to draw you any further into it."

I pulled back, tears still coursing down my cheeks. "What do you know about him?"

"Yes," came a cool, carefully contained voice, and she flinched so violently that her shoulder caught my chin, which in turn sent my teeth right into my bottom lip, "What _do_ you know about me?"

His fingers were wrapped tightly around her upper arm, digging deeply into the flesh there. She was pressing her lips so tightly together that they went white. "I seem to remember telling you not to interfere here," he said, and with his other, unoccupied hand he made a rapid gesture, and then she disappeared and his newly-emptied hand clenched, very briefly, into a fist.

"Sarah," he said.

"Jareth, they're saying Toby might never wake up. That wasn't part of the deal."

"You cannot have something for nothing, sweet thing. The scales must always be balanced in order to begin." He stepped forward and took hold of my upper arms, looking intently into my face. "You've cut your lip."

I turned my face away. "Who was she?"

"A spurned would-be lover," he said, and despite myself, a giggle bubbled up in my throat. He frowned. "Don't laugh, Sarah. I'm perfectly serious. I want only you."

"So you're telling me she came here to turn me against you because you wouldn't-"

"Service her, yes," he said impatiently, and I laughed harder, feeling blood trickle down my chin. He drew a white square of cloth from his pocket and wiped it across my mouth. "Let me heal you."

"I want you to heal _Toby_ ," I insisted, but he had removed a glove more quickly than I could blink and then he drew two bare fingers across my swollen, bloody lip, which tingled warmly beneath his touch, almost as if it had burst and then knitted itself back together. Answering heat blossomed between my thighs, and I shifted beneath his gaze. "Don't," I said, but he drew me closer to himself and I let his arms settle heavily around me, the second bizarre embrace of the night.

"Your champion is nearly to the center," he said, and I heard his voice through his chest where my ear rested. "I thought you would be glad to hear how quickly he is progressing."

"How long has it been for him?" I asked, knowing that time passed differently Underground, but he didn't answer.

"He has found some of your old friends."

"They're helping him?"

"Unwisely, but yes. They have helped him." His arms held me out so that he could examine me. His eyes were fixed on my mouth, and I took my newly normal-sized bottom lip between my teeth again to worry at it, uncomfortably. "Sarah, stop," he said as the tender skin split open anew, making me hiss in pain. "I can stitch the surface back together, but I cannot heal it more completely than that on this side. You must leave it alone. Unless…"

He trailed off, and I looked at him, fascinated, as his eyes went dark and his mouth went slack. He took my chin in his hand and held it steady, and I, for my part, held eye contact with him. Or I would have, if he had been looking at my eyes instead of at my mouth. Before I could react, he had bent to me and taken my lip between his, and I felt heat surge powerfully across the cut, his magic threaded through a thousand tiny needles mending my flesh, and then it faded but a different heat entirely was warming me as he sucked it gently into his mouth, scraped his own teeth across it with exquisite care, and as if he couldn't help himself, slipped his hand from my chin around to cradle my head, keeping my mouth flush against his.

I pulled away after a moment, though every nerve ending in my body was electrified, and was savagely pleased to hear a hitch in his breathing. "All that for a split lip?" I asked him, wiping my mouth on my sleeve to try to provoke him to anger even as my heart beat traitorously fast.

"I live to serve," he replied, and he regained his usual impassive demeanor, that odd darkness having receded from his eyes.

"You're telling me you couldn't have done that without a full-on kiss."

"I believe that's exactly what I intimated."

"God, why can't you just talk like a normal person?" I burst, suddenly feeling exhausted and irate.

"I try my best," he said, and actually sounded injured. "It's sometimes difficult to keep up with the times."

I sighed and sat back down into the chair I'd been occupying before half of the Underground had showed up to badger me. "Are you really here about Josh?"

"Ah," he said, and a smile I didn't like at all spread across his lips. "Yes. I am about to drop in on him again. Would you like me to pass on a message?"

"Through you? Not a chance."

"You wound me," he said, but sounded anything but wounded. "Young Theseus will have to continue without encouragement from his beloved Ariadne."

"Stop," I said, tiredly. "Just stop. This isn't a game."

"No," he agreed. "It's a story. It's your story, but it's also decidedly not. And who am I, Sarah? Have you cast me as Minos?"

"Who else? Who else could you possibly be, Jareth? King of the Labyrinth, accepting child tributes and sending runners to fail your maze to salve your own wounded ego. It's the part you were born to play."

"Perhaps for the first act," he said. "Stay strong, Sarah. We'll soon see to the conclusion of our hero's journey."

* * *

The terror of the storm had slowly - very slowly - receded as he hobbled through the dungeons. As it had been while he had still been out in the open, the path forward occasionally offered branch points but never forced him to divert from his straightaway. He clutched the torch, afraid that it would be extinguished at any moment, leaving him to feel his way along in the dark without anything to warn for the next dream-trap, but it stayed both lit and warm as he advanced.

It had been silent down here, to begin, but since the storm-nightmare it had been filled with whispers and mutters and groans, and the odor was beginning to transition from simply old and musty to something older and sourer. Josh tried not to think about it, but his t-shirt was cold and damp, particularly in the underarms where he'd sweated through it, even in the cold of the winding prison. Rancid fear-sweat. It probably wasn't very white anymore.

Something glinted in the corridor before him, and he held the torch high and moved slightly closer to examine it. It was a massive spiderweb - of _course_ it was - and it stretched across the entire width and height of the tunnel, intricate and geometric and flawless, a pattern of fractals that shrank to its center. In the torchlight, it shone like spun gold, diamonds winking at branch points.

There was a skittering further down the hallway, and eight spindly, hairy legs thick as his fingers came unbidden and unwelcome to his mind, which revolted immediately. Glittering compound eyes, insectile fangs, chittering mandibles, grotesque swollen abdomen. Josh absolutely would not touch the web. If he touched the web, he would be stuck and its creator would feel the tension in its masterfully-built snare, would come quickly and terribly along the diaphanous strands. He reached for the knife in his pocket, unwrapped it, and in one quick movement, holding his breath, he slashed it through the web to clear the way forward-

But the web dissolved into nothing, smeared and bled like watercolors into an impression of its former self, tendrils of smoke dissipating where he'd torn the strands, and he realized - far too late - that this was another nightmare and that the labyrinth was delighting in drawing him into each successive dream, understanding that he would have gone either way because he had no other choice, and choosing to trick and torment him anyway.

When the smoke cleared and the lights came up, Josh took a cautious look around the room that he found himself in, which was luxuriously warm and dry. His stomach shrank.

He'd been dreading something like this. This particular nightmare wasn't one that he'd ever had while sleeping. It was a waking fear, a peek into the deepest insecurity of any boy who has ever loved a girl, and it made his chest constrict. It was the cheapest kind of cheating, exploiting the vulnerability of his deepest insecurities to draw out an emotional response. But then again, he hadn't expected the goblin king to play fair.

Across the room, on an enormous bed lavishly strewn with silk sheets, Sarah was naked and moving, slowly, deliberately, on top of a beautiful young man with olive skin and almond eyes. One of his hands was wrapped around her hip, guiding her rhythm, and the other was at her shoulder, and she rocked her hips forward, then back, moaning long and low. She threw her head back as he bucked into her.

Josh felt nausea rising in his gorge.

"How does this one make you feel?"

Jareth had popped into existence right at his shoulder, and the sudden voice in his ear made Josh flinch. He clenched his fists, wanting nothing more than to turn and bury one of them in the goblin king's face.

"I think you know how it makes me feel," said Josh, turning away from the scene to face Jareth. "Because I think you've been watching her, and you've been watching us, and I think you feel exactly this same way every time I fuck her." The obscenity felt wrong, awful in his mouth, filthy and crude, but he longed to wipe the smile off of the king's smug face with it.

"Is that what you call your adorably clumsy fumbling with her body? Fucking? You wouldn't know fucking even if I myself gave you a masterclass in it."

The noises changed. Her moaning turned to keening, high and frantic.

" _Jareth! Please! Please let me come!_ "

Josh turned away from Jareth's awful smile, back to the bed to see what he absolutely did not want to see. And there he was, the goblin king, white and slender and naked and obscene. Sarah was on her back, her head at the foot of the bed, her legs spread wide and propped up on the headboard, pillows stacked beneath her hips as he rutted against her, teeth bared in a terrifying smile.

Her hands were gripping at his back, raking vivid red lines down his skin, nearly flaying it open in her desperation, and Jareth - the Jareth that was fucking her into the mattress, not the Jareth who was watching him watch it happen - looked straight into Josh's eyes and laughed. She writhed beneath him, mewling breathlessly.

Josh had never heard her make noises like these before.

"You'll have to ask more convincingly than that, pet."

" _Fuck me harder!_ " she cried, and Josh watched the snap of Jareth's hips as he drove himself more deeply into her.

"Do you love the boy?" he asked her, laughing.

She punctuated each of his thrusts with a sharp cry, meeting his hips with her own.

"Who do you love, Sarah? Who is it that you love? Who is the only person you could ever find it in your cold, broken, damaged little heart to love?"

" _You, it's you, it's you, I love you and only you,_ " she sobbed raggedly, and Josh felt something in him shatter into a million pieces as Jareth wormed his hand between their glistening bodies, rubbed insistently at her until she screamed and arched against him, shuddering, and all the while, his gaze was not on the creature beneath him, but instead fixed unerringly, unnervingly, maliciously on Josh's face.

"It's just a dream," Josh said, turning to the Jareth who was standing beside him, grinning wolfishly, breathing just a little bit too hard. "Of course it isn't real. She doesn't love you. She could never love you."

"I think you'll find that of the two of us, I'm exactly the one she's capable of loving," he said. "Haven't you wondered why a pretty little thing like Sarah was so completely unattached before you came along? Haven't you wondered why she never speaks of previous lovers? Why she prefers you to take her in the dark? Why she was so ready to wish you away?"

"You've never had her."

"Oh, but I will," said Jareth, and when he snapped his fingers and disappeared, the nightmare did too, and Josh sank to sit on the cold stone ground of the maze, his head held numbly in his hands, trying and failing to banish the memory of her alabaster body arching wantonly beneath the king.


	4. Anagnorisis

**Author's Note:** before we get into the chapter, I would like to warn for graphic violence and character death, in case that is a dealbreaker for any among you. (Sorry for the semi-spoiler if it isn't, but I like to be safe!) I am, as always, happy to hear thoughts on the chapter from anyone, but I do ask that your reviews remain civil. Also as always, for easier interaction and greater volume of author's ramblings, come find me on AO3 (same username).

* * *

 _She will_ never _love you._

The stale breath of the labyrinth was insidious, clawing at the inside of his mind with a tenacity that he could not defend against. He shoved the palms of his hands so forcefully into his eyes that he saw stars behind his eyelids.

 _How could she love you when he can offer anything she ever wanted?_

But he doesn't, Josh wanted to wail. But he _doesn't_ offer her anything she ever wanted. He won't give her the only thing she _does_ want.

 _She would never stoop to even think of you when she could have a king._

The wall against his back shifted, expanding and then contracting like bellows. Like lungs.

 _He is fierce and powerful and beautiful to behold. She is his queen, his equal. He offers her a kingdom. He offers her himself, such as he is. What can you offer to her, such as_ you _are?_

He dropped his hands from his eyes and opened them, expecting to see nothing but the darkness threatening to swallow him whole, but when he did, the torch still burned merrily where he had dropped it, not more than two feet away from where he had let his fingers fall to the dusty stone. When he moved to pick it up, he found that his muscles had frozen and seized up, and he spent several minutes in agony, slowly extending the range of motion of each joint.

 _And it's funny,_ continued the whisper in his mind, _that you're suffering here for love of her. You've shouldered her burdens and crawled down into the dark for her because you think it will make her love you back while she's aboveground trying not to think of you between visits from him._

He rose to a crouch, abused tendons and ligaments screaming. How long had he been sitting here? How much time had he lost? How much of his mind had he allowed the labyrinth to intrude upon? How much ground had he conceded?

Too much.

The fingers of the hand not holding the torch slithered down to touch the outside of the pocket that held the crystal. He'd already known it was there, constantly aware of its loathsome weight against his leg, but touching it through the flannel of his pants reassured him that at least he had this one last defense, though the prospect of touching it to his bare skin turned his stomach.

The knife.

He'd been holding the knife when he had entered the dream - _don't think of it, don't think about it, it was only a nightmare and it's ended now_ \- and it wasn't in his pocket. He caught a glimpse of dirty white linen out of the corner of his eye and bent, with effort, to snatch it from the ground, but there was no knife there. Despite every muscle in his body protesting, he dropped to his knees and scrabbled lamely, one-handed, in the dust and dirt on the floor, praying for his fingers to brush iron.

There - a glint, the dull reflection of the orange flame - he threw himself down the hallway to close his fingers around the cold hilt of the knife, raised it to his lips and kissed the dirty blade, breathing in its iron scent, metallic and hungry. He wrapped it in the linen and heard it rip through the fabric once or twice as he pulled it too tight, but when the blade's vicious edge had been sufficiently protected, he tucked it into the opposite pocket.

He leaned against the wall, bracing his weight as best he could to stagger back to a standing position, and concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply. Long breath in, hold it, let it out slowly. Long breath in, hold it - hold it - hold it -

A gasping for breath, back to the cycle, out and then in, hold it, let it out slowly in angry determination to master himself. One step forward, and then another, and then another. His fingers cramped and shook where they gripped the handle of the torch, but he held tight and gritted his teeth, concentrated on making his steps long and even, chased away the descending dread by bearing down on his bad leg and ankle and using the resultant pain to sweep everything else from his mind. He would use his wounds against the labyrinth to reach the center, and then he would turn around and use them again to make his exit.

The comforts of home felt a million miles away, and they probably were at least that far if the distance between Josh and home was even quantifiable in units that could cross dimensions. A hot shower, a warm bed, hell, even just a bandaid. Sarah's body, flush against his-

No, don't think of that.

Straight and straight and straight and straight. _Go forwards, only down, never left nor right - no, it was straight and left, wasn't it? Or is it forward and down?_

" _Isn't what you seek hidden in the dungeons?"_

The corridor sloped before him. Not a staircase, simply a gradual decline, leading him further and further, deeper into the bowels of the dungeons beneath the castle.

 _All paths lead to the center._

 _Forward and down._

* * *

After Jareth and his non-consort paid me a visit in the waiting room of the hospital, I'd allowed myself to consider that maybe a hot meal and some sleep would be the best thing for me. If I was honest with myself, I didn't want to spend another night in the hospital. It was dark and too quiet at night, and I was forever seeing shadows where they shouldn't be out of the corners of my eyes.

I thought that maybe if I went home, I'd be able to concentrate on something besides the knot of fear and guilt that was taking up valuable real estate in my chest. So I drove myself home, played the radio far too loudly and rolled all of my windows down even though it was snowing thickly outside, and I resented the world for its Christmas spirit while my little brother was lying, alone and responseless, in a hospital bed in a room that didn't even have a window.

When I pulled up at the house, there was a light in every window, and when I let myself in, closing and locking the door behind me, Dad came to greet me with the first hug of the night that felt real. He folded me up in his arms, dropped his chin on my head. "Thanks for coming home, sweetheart."

I didn't say anything, but hot tears leaked from my eyes to leave tiny dark splotches on his button-up shirt. We stood there like that for a long time, neither of us willing to leave this one small comfort, his arms squeezing me so tightly that under any other circumstance I would have laughed and squirmed free, but now it felt like he was the only thing tethering me here, to reality.

"Sarah?" Karen's voice floated out of the kitchen, strained but light, and I could smell tomato and garlic and onion. "I made spaghetti. Come have some."

I sat down at the table to a plate heaped high with noodles, and she ladled sauce onto it until I thought the plate would overflow. "I don't know if I can eat this much."

I found that I was ravenous, though, and I ate nearly my entire plate of food while Dad and Karen, who had already eaten, sat at the table clutching mugs of tea and watching me inhale my dinner. I tried to help them with the clean-up, afterward, and they were willing to let me help, but three proved to be a crowd in the kitchen, so I excused myself and told them I was going to have a shower.

My old, faded terrycloth robe was hanging in the closet of my room, and I thought of Jareth's penchant for dropping in on me while I was in the bathroom - though he did seem to have impeccable timing - and snagged it from the hanger. I looped it over the towel bar in the bathroom and stepped into the shower, running the water as hot as I could stand it. After I'd lathered and rinsed and repeated as many times as I dared before it just felt wasteful, I stood numbly under the water, easing the temperature up bit by bit, imagining my skin blistering and bubbling and peeling.

A wave of nausea crashed over me; my knees went weak. I grabbed at the handle and shut the water off, but still couldn't breathe. The heat was choking me, and I staggered out of the shower, wrapped myself in my towel and left my robe hanging in the bathroom, thick with steam. My heart pounded uncomfortably in my chest and my vision blurred, and clutching the towel around my dripping body, I took shaky steps to my bedroom and collapsed across the bed. My skin itched, but I couldn't bear even to reach to scratch at it. _I deserve this,_ I thought.

After several minutes, my heart settled and my head cleared and I was able to focus on the sensation of the beads of water on my insufficiently towel-dried body collecting, running into each other and then down into the coverlet. My hair was soaking wet, drenching the blankets. The overt unpleasantness of a wet bed finally motivated me to stand and dry myself and reach for an oversized t-shirt, a pair of underwear and my pajama pants.

I put myself to sleep, then, crawling under the damp covers and listening to my own heartbeat, cupping my hands over my ears to try to drown out Dad and Karen's voices. I couldn't make out the words, but even the muffled sound of their conversation, the hills and valleys of it, the pitch and pace through the wall separating our bedrooms made the anxious pit in my stomach grow deeper.

 _Your brother is sick and it's all your fault. Your boyfriend is gone and it's all your fault._ My mind revolved through the two accusations in the dark and that special dread that was reserved only for situations where Jareth was involved began to descend on me. I closed my eyes, and the sensation of terror, the conviction of having made a very large and permanent mistake, the surety that something worse-than-death was imminent intensified. Restless and hopeless, I reached out to the only person I thought might hear me.

"Please," I said, pitifully. "Please. Please, let me sleep. I wish you would just let me sleep."

From my bed, I saw twin glimmers in the darkness, cat's eyes catching the light, and then I swear I saw a Cheshire cat's crooked grin, and then my mind quieted and dropped me unceremoniously into slumber.

* * *

It felt redundant to repeat it, but the walk through the dungeons was interminable. It could have been hours, it could have been days. He could have been here forever, all his memories of another life just another cruel lie. Josh wanted nothing more than a chance to sleep, but the waking dreams were growing exponentially worse and taking far longer to shake, and he wasn't prepared to face the labyrinth having already surrendered to unconsciousness.

He had apparently walked long enough for the labyrinth to stop offering alternative routes. Now the only interruptions in his chosen corridors were barred doors that went into cells - oubliettes - some of them standing open on rusty hinges, some of them locked shut, but all of them were silent until he stopped to listen, peering into the darkness between the bars that his torch couldn't pierce. Then came the quiet waves of grunting and muttering, whispers and groans, and the occasional distant scream. He'd wondered more than once whether or not calling for Toby might bring the boy to him, but he had grown quite sure that whatever it was lurking down here beneath the castle would be drawn to his voice.

His abused muscles were cold and tight, and putting one foot before the other had grown to a monumental task, each step more difficult than the one before. Pausing to lean up against the wall, he stretched his legs until the pain ratched up to unbearable, and then he took several deep breaths and patted each pocket. Knife, crystal. The chain hung heavily around his neck. He still had everything he'd come in here with. Except, perhaps, his dignity. He stepped into a foul-smelling puddle and yelped, then dragged his bare, wet foot along the dirt on the floor, trying not to think about what it probably was that he'd stepped in.

Without warning, the light from the torch in his hand sank low, and he held it in front of his face, watching the flames lap sadly at the stale air in the tunnel, praying for their survival. The light surged again and he let out a breath he hadn't meant to hold, then took another step, and another. The shadows threatened to overwhelm him, but couldn't quite reach him through the circle of light from the torch, and as he moved, he thought of what had come before.

He'd just been another kid playing at being an adult when he'd met Sarah. His undergraduate experience had been exactly what everyone had told him it would be. He'd played a lot of Division II football, had attended most of his classes, had made friends with just about everyone on campus and partied hard more weekends than not, and by the start of his senior year, he'd done well enough and had endeared himself enough to his advisor that the man had sat him down and told him that DII football wasn't going to pay the bills and had he considered furthering his education in graduate school?

Before that, of course, he'd grown up on a farm, an only child and his parents' pride and joy, and he'd graduated high school with all thirty-some members of his class, and he'd earned a full scholarship to college, a little for grades and a little for sports and probably a lot for being from a rural, underrepresented area, even though his type was otherwise far from underrepresented, and maybe in a way he'd been looking for more family ever since, finding himself in a big world so far from home.

And when he'd found Sarah, lovely and frail and not-entirely-here, he'd been taken with the idea of being something - someone - to her that she hadn't even known she'd needed, with building himself a family through sheer heroics, through being charming and indispensable and fundamentally good. That first night she'd opened up and he'd known, then, that he could be something to her that he'd wanted to be his entire life, that she could offer him the fulfillment of his dearest dream. So while it rankled at him - Jareth's insistence on referring back to Theseus, the goblin king forever calling him a hero and clearly not imbuing the term with one iota of respect - it wasn't untrue. He'd always wanted to be the hero, even if when the dream began in his adolescence, he'd imagined riding high on the shoulders of a football team after the game-winning play rather than achieving the fantastical rescue of a child from a magical prison for a beautiful sad-eyed woman.

But dreams can change.

Still, the skeleton of the story was the same, and here he was, improbably wandering a malicious labyrinth that he'd known of but hadn't believed in a week ago, and he wouldn't believe that it was happening at all but for the vicious focus of it all, the clarity of the fear and the pain, the surreal-become-tangible, the complete lack of anything at all dreamlike about his surroundings. Magic was real, and this awful place was thrumming with it.

But surely - _surely_ \- Jareth hadn't actually cast himself as the evil king. He was adamant that he would get the girl in the end. Didn't most villains want to eliminate the girl, take their joy in breaking down the hero by stripping him of everything he'd hoped to gain? What was Jareth's endgame? Was he really just in the wish-granting business, and happened to be granting wishes when Josh had made his? Was he really just passing through, serendipitously finding his old opponent standing behind the wish-maker?

That story hardly held water. Too many coincidences eventually cease to be coincidence.

The torch sputtered out with a little hiss and the shadows rushed forward to embrace him. The labyrinth sighed around him, and an unpleasantly warm, moist breeze brushed his face, drew with it the odor of old blood and slow decay. Josh breathed through his mouth to try to escape the smell, but that was worse - he could taste it in the back of his throat, and it made him gag, violently and painfully. The groans and whispers waxed and waned, never rising enough to be intelligible, and he fought to keep his breathing steady, curling and uncurling his fingers at his sides, scuffing his feet along the ground, doing anything at all to keep the panic at arm's length.

Then he blinked, darkness beyond darkness, and when he opened his eyes the scene had changed.

A path - an asphalt path - stretched out before him, lined thickly by trees reaching bare, spindly fingers on clawed hands to the sky. An errant leaf here or there clung tightly to the branches, refusing to relinquish its grasp on life even though life had so clearly already left it. Rain drizzled onto his arms and neck, prickling the skin there to pucker into goosebumps. The path itself was dappled with fallen leaves, the sides of it piled high with mounds of them in monochromatic palette, this orange-brown death-signifier: the vibrant yellows and oranges and crimsons had faded with time, and the leaves glistened wetly and silver in the white-blue light from small lampposts that studded the path at odd intervals.

Another dream, another benign beginning.

He took a step or two, his feet wet, leaves sticking to his skin instead of crunching underfoot in the mist - and how could they crunch when everything here was so damp - and listened very intently. The path curved away from him before and behind, and grass rose silver-green where the blanket of leaves thinned and grew patchy. It was so very quiet here, and the stillness disturbed him. The subject of this nightmare - for surely it was a nightmare - was still unclear to him, which instilled him with nervous tension. He bounced on the balls of his feet, and was thankful for the respite from his bruised and possibly broken body back in the labyrinth.

"Silver linings, huh?" he said to himself, and his voice broke the silence like a gunshot.

A snuffling, too close behind him. The snap of a twig. His breath caught in his throat.

It was a low growl that made him run, shooting away like a sprinter off the starting blocks, cold and wet and terrified, refusing to look behind himself to see his would-be assailant. As he passed the first lamppost, its light winked out without warning, plunging the path behind him into darkness, and he moved forward, fear nipping at his ankles but a kind of exhilaration rising in his chest as his feet pounded the ground, his legs fatigued but otherwise unhindered.

The fear of the pursuit. Here he was, able to run at full speed or faster than full speed, and although the lights were blinking out, at least there was light, there, ahead of him, and what a change from the labyrinth, what a welcome distraction from the darkness of the dungeon, to finally have the uncertainty resolved, to know that he was being chased and to see the path ahead.

He whipped around the corner, losing traction to a leaf that adhered briefly - but long enough - to his heel. The rain intensified, now fat little droplets that spattered across his arms and shoulders instead of the mist, and silver-black puddles gathered in little divots in the uneven asphalt of his paved trail. The sound of - feet? paws? hooves? - thumping and splashing on the path behind him urged him on, and he reached deep within himself for the energy reserved for just this situation, crudely unlocked by a painful surge of adrenaline.

The lamps began to wink out faster, now, one after the other before him, faster than he could run and he began to fall behind, running toward a light further and further in the distance, and he felt his fear overtake the strange, primitive joy he'd felt, and now he was simply prey, running for his own life from the unseen predator. The bottoms of his pant legs were sodden and heavy, pulling the waistband down dangerously low on his hips, but he could not slow to readjust them and grew accustomed to the uncomfortable ridge of the wet hem beneath his heel each time it struck the ground.

Now the single remaining visible lamppost was nothing but a pinprick of light in the distance, and he threw everything he had within himself into one last, desperate sprint, and then his foot came down on a pile of leaves and lost its traction, and he was falling, skidding crazily, skinning his elbows, stripping them raw with roadrash, and he heard his attacker approach, invisible in the darkness, come to an ungainly halt above his body, its growl roaring like an engine, furious and voracious.

Something - teeth? something else? - sank sharply into his shoulder, and he cried out, drove the opposite fist into flesh that yielded wetly to him as pain flared white-hot in this newest wound, and then the scene fell away, and he woke in the labyrinth, clutching his shoulder, and there was the torch, somehow lit and seated neatly in a sconce in the wall, even though this entire tunnel seemed more an afterthought than anything else, dug out by something with claws if the uneven gouges in the walls were anything to go by. His shirt was wet with blood, but when he pulled the sleeve away from his skin, his shoulder was unmarked, and its painful throbbing was receding to an indistinct memory. Josh drew a shuddering breath and reached for the torch, then turned to face in the direction he'd never deviated from and-

The corridor came to an abrupt halt. He stared at the dead end, even stepped forward and ran his fingers along it, fully expecting it to melt away, another optical illusion, but the tunnel had ended and here he was, trapped within it. He turned, and saw that the path broke into a T behind him, and he had to choose right or left, and his head hurt. This was impossible; he hadn't had to turn to get here in the first place. _Do I go left? Or do I go right, because I'm backtracking, which would make the right a left?_

He stood and considered, wrung rust-colored liquid out of the sleeve of his formerly white shirt, considered some more, lifted the torch and went right. He limped along until he came to another branch point, and then he turned left, having forgotten which way he was oriented. This particular route ended very quickly in a dead end, and he panicked for a moment, cursing quietly under his breath and turning back, resolving to go right because that would turn him back onto his original trajectory.

But this, too, ended in a dead end, and he refused to think about the time he was wasting, refused to let go of his knowledge of the one path he had walked all the long way here, and he returned to where the branch point had been, trailing the fingers of his left hand along the wall, feeling for the path he'd been on originally, resolving to never stray from the Left Plan again, and as he walked, a small worry began to nibble at the corner of his mind, because had he been walking for this long before, in the wrong direction? Was the labyrinth cheating?

He moved into an excruciatingly painful jog, only able to persist because his fear was driving him harder and harder, helping him to flog his body into submission, and he lost himself in it, forgot to pay any attention at all until he had actually run directly into another dead end, and this time, he knew the labyrinth was cheating. He _knew_. He had come from a path that had connected to this tunnel, and now that original path was nowhere to be found. It had simply passed out of existence.

The door to a tiny cell stood ajar, several inches of darkness between the door and its stone frame, and he tried to push it open with his fingertips, then with his entire hand as it stuck in the muddy straw strewn across the ground. He held the torch high, but there was nothing in this cell, nothing but a pair of shackles hanging, motionless, against the far wall and the dirty, musty straw on the floor.

The labyrinth was folding him up within itself, shepherding him here to this tiny cell - oubliette? - deep in its bowels, and he would not obey. He would not bow to its whim. He stepped further from the door, pulled it shut by the bars in its tiny window, felt the wood grind against the frame as it sealed shut. And then he reached for his pocket. If he couldn't find his way to the center any other way, he would resort to using Jareth's crystal.

But the crystal was not there.

* * *

I woke late, cozy and unburdened, and rolled out of bed to sit on the side with my feet on the floor. I rubbed at my bleary eyes, and for a few precious seconds, I was blissfully unaware of the strange limbo that I'd been trapped in by the violent meeting of my past and present. I saw my bag lying on the floor just inside the door of my bedroom; the novel had fallen out of it, its spine bent so that its pages fanned out into the air. And I remembered.

Dread, guilt, fear and foreboding settled heavily into my chest, and I drew several breaths, each slightly deeper than the last, to reassure myself that the shrinking of my chest was psychological rather than physiological, that my lungs hadn't actually collapsed. When I was satisfied that they would go on drawing breath and that my heart would go on pumping, I turned my mind to other pressing concerns. Where was Josh in the labyrinth? Had he found Toby? Was he all right?

Jareth didn't tell lies, but implicit in that statement was that while untruths never passed his lips, he wouldn't consider omissions to be falsehoods. And he regularly refused to answer questions that I posed to him directly. I sighed heavily. One of the muscles running up from behind my shoulderblade to the base of my skull had tightened uncomfortably, and when I turned my head to a particular angle, pain screamed along it like a harp string, plucked and left to vibrate its cry back to silence.

The trick, then, was to ask him the pertinent questions - something I suspected I'd always known - because even a lack of response could be powerfully revealing. A reluctance to pry rose powerfully in me; there were questions that I didn't want answers to, because I was not the runner in the labyrinth, and I couldn't contact Josh even if I learned some crucial detail. Better not to know. Ignorance is bliss. Not forever - but nothing's forever.

I stood and looked back at the bed, and when I did so, I noticed a long, deep depression in the blankets next to where I'd been lying. And there, in the pillow, a second depression, next to mine. I bent to look closer, and there on the coverslip was a long, silken strand of hair the color of morning sunlight; I pinched it between my fingers and held it close to my face, and then I opened my fingers, let it fall to the floor where it coiled. I remembered the pleasant warmth curled around my body and lifted the t-shirt I'd slept in: there, across my ribs, the fading five-fingered imprint of a hand belonging to an arm that had held me, soothed me, rocked me to sleep, calmed my inner turmoil.

I lacked the emotional energy to be angry, and settled for vaguely irritated but also unwillingly grateful for the night of untroubled sleep. A thought, unbidden: _I wonder if he kept his gloves on._

Then I wondered what else he might not have kept on, but dismissed the thought as frivolous, unproductive, and more than a little bit salacious, especially with Josh taking my place Underground, encountering whatever the labyrinth was conjuring up to throw at him. I didn't need to heap more guilt into my stomach; I was already practically choking on it.

When I went downstairs, wrapped in an old cableknit sweater, I found that Karen had scrambled an absurd number of eggs and was keeping them warm in the oven. She and my father were quiet, seated beside each other and holding mugs of coffee, but when she saw me, she moved to stand.

"No, don't worry, I'll get it for myself," I said, and hurried into the kitchen before she could catch me. I spooned slightly rubbery eggs onto a plate and poured myself some coffee, then sat down at the table. No one said much, and when I managed to convince myself to swallow the last bite of egg on my plate, I pushed my chair back from the table.

"I'm going to go see Toby," I said.

"Sarah, maybe you should stay here for a little while," Karen began, but I spoke over her.

"I slept well last night. I had dinner last night and breakfast this morning. I can't sit around. It makes me feel like I'm going to lose my mind."

"Sarah," Dad said, "We can't do anything for him."

"I want to be there when he wakes up," I said. "I feel more productive there than I do waiting around here. I'm going to go, but I'll come back for dinner."

They looked after me sadly, but made no move to stop me. It was just another part of adulthood that I still wasn't accustomed to: I could come and go as I pleased, and this was no exception. I couldn't stay in the house one more minute, stewing in self-loathing and self-pity and impatient fear. I wanted to be at Toby's side. I needed to be there when Josh made his escape from the labyrinth. I needed to be ready for whatever came next.

Dad and Karen were talking with their voices pitched low as I zipped up my coat and slipped into my shoes, and I half-expected one or both of them to try to talk me out of leaving, but neither came after me. Half-disappointed, half-relieved, I shut the front door behind me and began my drive to the hospital.

It was unsurprising to me when Jareth appeared in the passenger seat, propping his boots up on the dashboard.

"Don't," I said, "You'll get footprints on the dash."

His feet remained where they were.

"Did you sleep well?" he asked, practically purring with self-satisfaction, knowing the answer without my confirmation.

"I did. Thank you," I said simply, preferring not to discuss it further. We rolled to a stop at a red light, and he looked out of the window.

"I like your corner of the world. It's as nice as anything else I've seen up here."

I didn't know if he expected me to thank him again for what he surely thought had been a compliment, but I wasn't about to take credit for the snowy landscape. "Is Josh okay?"

He tapped his fingers against his lips. "He's extremely close to the labyrinth's center."

"Is he _okay_?"

"He is alive," said Jareth, with a smile that bared most of his teeth.

"Jareth," I said, a warning, and I felt him look at me.

"He is doing better than I anticipated, but his most difficult test is yet to come."

I bit the inside of my cheek.

"You know how the story goes, don't you, Sarah?"

* * *

He dug his hand right down into the damp - everything was damp, damn this place - flannel pocket of his pants as his heart rose into his throat, even though he knew he would not find it here, that it was impossible that he might have missed the sphere of the crystal when patting along the surface of the fabric, that its weight had evaporated even as its form remained. He slapped his other thigh desperately with his hand, looking for the knife, and that was gone, too, and then his hands flew to his throat and the iron chain was also absent.

Josh was panting now, turning back to retrace his steps, and he found that he could make it forty paces down the hallway until that, too, was sealed off against him. He slumped against the wall, tracing the deep scratches in the stone with his fingers, which were themselves nearly numb with cold. It hadn't been this cold down here before. He had descended into the dungeons, and in so doing, he had been tricked into entering his tomb.

"Come on, then."

He thrust the torch high into the air, looking closely at the walls in its dim light. Nothing out of the ordinary, but he'd heard a female voice, clear as a bell though old and quavery. The door to the cell stood ajar again, shadows unfurling at its edges. He took several steps forward, holding the flames out in front of himself and peering into the darkness. Was there a figure there? There hadn't been one before, but the labyrinth was shifting almost before his eyes.

Stepping entirely into the cell, he explored each corner, slowly, waiting for the voice to return, looking for a person or a goblin or even a pile of rags and bones, anything to convince himself that he had not gone entirely mad, that he had not always been alone down here. But there was nothing in the little room but the manacles, the dirty straw, the shifting shadows-

The door scraped shut behind him, and he knew as he turned that it was too late. A scratchy chittering, a laughter that sounded more like the rustle of withered plants rose around him, and there was no one here with him in the oubliette, no one at all. He was shivering, barefoot and bare-armed, without the iron or the crystal, vulnerable and trapped in the literal underground. He sank, his shirt catching against the wall as he slid down to hug his knees, considered surrendering to his fate. Maybe if he called on Jareth, the king would let him live.

"This isn't really how your story ends, is it? How tragic. How pathetic." The voice spoke again, timeless and amused. "Think, Theseus."

"Don't _call_ me that," he snapped, and rose to his feet again in one smooth motion, effortlessly-

Effortlessly?

"It's like those Russian dolls!" he cried, and his torch snuffed out.

This time, he woke flat on his back on the floor of the dungeons and he had never been so glad to return to excruciating pain in his life, and before he even opened his eyes, he reached down his body to check on the crystal. Or he tried to, but his limbs were immobile, pinioned to the ground, and there was an awful weight on his chest, forcing him to gasp in shallow breaths.

He opened his eyes to wiry silver hair surrounding a withered old face inches from his, her bitter breath assaulting his senses. Black eyes glimmered, cloudy with age, and her cracked lips spread in a smile, baring blackened teeth. " _Very_ good. You've returned to the waking world," she said.

Josh couldn't speak. The paralysis had glued even his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

"It's almost a pity, you know," she continued, "I was so enjoying the taste of your terror. But I wouldn't want to slow the hero when he's so close to completing his quest. I have enough on my shoulders already without adding more of you."

His eyes flickered upward, caught briefly on the torch, seated again in a convenient sconce above them, before they fell on the mountain of garbage on her back. "Some call me the Junk Lady; some merely call me the Old Hag. I have many names, none of them particularly kind, and I do my best to live up to all of them. So tell me, young man. Would you like a trinket from your past?" The smile was still plastered to her face, though her lips were chapped and bloodied, and she reached up into the towering pile to extract a plump, pristine football. The scent of fresh leather cut even through the sourness of her breath.

Josh only wanted to be able to control his own body again, wanted the hag and her horrible collection of discarded dreams to climb up off of his chest and to leave him alone. He held eye contact with her and hoped she could read his gaze.

She sniffed noisily, drew her sleeve across her glistening nostrils. "Don't ever let me catch you saying I did you wrong. Most are not lucky enough to take leave of me so easily." And she rose to her feet, her toenails scraping at his chest through his shirt, and then she stepped off and dissolved into the darkness.

He wiggled a finger experimentally, and when that worked, he rose in a series of small, excruciating movements, hissing through his teeth. His hands flew to his pockets, and they felt the familiar shapes of the knife and the crystal, and he was reaching for the torch when he realized that he was standing at a branch point, that he had been lying at the center of a four-way intersection in the tunnels beneath the city, and he had no idea which direction he had been facing when the dreams had taken him.

Despair threatened to drown him, then, and he made the decision before his rational mind could catch back up, scooping the cloth-covered crystal into his hand, slipping it out of his pocket and untying the handkerchief. As the small square of cloth fluttered to the ground, the crystal in his hand began to blaze with light and heat, and he shielded his eyes with his other hand, unable to watch its unearthly light call to the labyrinth, drive the shadows from the corridors before him.

As the ground trembled beneath his feet, shrieking rose all around him, quietly at first but building to a cacophony until he was sure that it would pierce his eardrums, and when it cut away the ringing remained for an eternity, deafening him as the crystal had blinded him, and he stumbled forward, crying out as his weakened ankle rolled badly, feeling the stretch and snap of tendons before he collapsed to his knees.

Then silence, and the crystal in his hand grew heavier still, and as he opened his eyes and the flashing residue fell from them, he could see that the labyrinth was suffused in a grey, sourceless light, and before him extended another staircase that led down to a chamber, and he took slow, uneven steps down the stairs, holding the crystal gently but firmly, and when he reached the bottom he saw that the chamber was vast and cavernous, filled with rows of pillars twice as broad as he was, and at the far side there stood a bassinet of royal blue velvet.

Oh, but between Joshua and the bassinet, in the center of the great room...

It couldn't have been any other way.

The Minotaur.

* * *

Toby's room was cool and dark, and the spike of his heartbeat on the electronic monitor hypnotized me into drowsiness. As before, the nurses let me be, sitting quietly at his bedside.

Karen showed up to run her hand along his forehead, brush the hair back from her baby's eyes, to squeeze his fingers and talk to him. We'd all heard it was good to talk to loved ones, that they might hear us from their own great dark beyond and come toward the light. There was a sort of catharsis to it, and I left the room while she spoke to him, dry-eyed and subdued. Before she left, she gave me a tupperware container.

"For lunch," she said.

When she'd gone, I pulled the chair up to his bedside, interlocked my fingers with his, and put my lips to his ear. "Toby," I whispered, "I've told you lots of stories, but I've never told you this one, and it's because I was afraid and ashamed, but I'm going to tell you now. It's a story about a little girl and her baby brother, and I want you to know that the little girl loved her brother, but she didn't understand how much she loved him at the time, so she made a terrible mistake."

For the better part of an hour - maybe two; I hadn't worn a watch - I told Toby the story of the silly, selfish girl who wished her brother away to a king, and I told him how much she loved that brother, enough to face her fears, enough to solve a maze, enough to leave the king who offered everything she'd ever wanted if she would just stay.

"That's the thing about wishes, Toby. They're never what you think they're going to be. There's enough wiggle room to make just about any wish or dream into something awful. So, you see, I couldn't stay with him, and I chose you. I chose you because I love you, and I've loved you more every day ever since, and I want you to hold on until Josh gets back. Can you do that for me, Toby? Can you stay strong?"

I watched his face. His eyes moved beneath his eyelids. A long, thin shadow fell across the bed.

"You've become quite the storyteller, Sarah."

"I guess you learn to tell stories when you can't escape your dreams any other way," I replied.

"Is that what you want? To escape your dreams?"

"Why are you here, Jareth?" An edge crept into my voice.

"Theseus has arrived at the center of the maze. Now there is nothing left for us but to wait."

I shivered. "Stop calling him that."

"Aren't you curious about what he'll find there?"

"You've already told me, haven't you? _Theseus_ is going to face whatever your Minotaur is down there. And he's going to _win_ , Jareth, and he'll come back here and I will finally shut the door on the labyrinth and on you once and for all."

* * *

Josh stood, still as a statue, framed in the arch of the doorway to the room. Some figure he must cut, swollen ankle, bruised body, a madman's crystal sphere clutched so tightly in his fingers that he was sure it would splinter. Wild blue eyes beneath an uneven fringe of damp, greasy blond hair, a pair of pajama pants and a formerly white undershirt, bare feet streaked with mud and dust.

And he did not dare move a muscle as he watched the monster sleep, stretched out across the obsidian floor of the chamber, claws retracted, the whistle of its breath indicating that it was alive, that it had survived all other intrepid heroes come to face it and Josh was simply the most recent in a long, unbroken line of Athenian tributes challenging their destinies.

But that was ridiculous, because no other Theseus would have come specifically looking for Sarah's baby brother. So was the labyrinth merely playing the game that he and Sarah had started?

This, his final test, a sleeping monster with curling horns and broad chest, fists nearly the size of Josh's head, lay between him and the end of his quest: vanquish it to return home. He willed his fingers to loosen around the crystal, finding them loath to release it, coaxing them bit by bit from its warm curve. The light within dimmed and winked out, but the chamber around him was not dark, merely grey as all of the labyrinth before the dungeons had been.

The crystal dropped smoothly into his pocket to hang reassuringly against his leg, and he slipped his other hand into the pocket with the knife, curled stiff fingers around its hilt and drew it out. Its swaddling dropped silently to the ground at his feet and its blade shone silver in the half-light, and Josh could see a sliver of his own gaunt, dirty face improbably reflected in its surface. _How long..?_

 _Don't think about it._

He strong-armed the rising madness from his mind, stepped forward on shaking legs, unsteadily but silently. Each step was agony, but the monster lay asleep and ignorant in the center of the room. This was not a dream, and though the sight of the beast filled him with revulsion, he was afraid to fall upon it with his knife.

 _This is not a child's game._

His bare feet were noiseless on the black floor as he approached and looked at the rough brown fur of the creature, matted and malodorous. He was close enough to touch it - his fingers clenched around the hilt, all thoughts of cinematic knife-fighting gone from his mind, it was simply Josh and the iron blade and the monster, who was many things but assuredly not fae, any knife would have done but the labyrinth was exulting in this particular knife which had itself become an extension of Josh.

His arm rose, shook and then steadied, the blade glittered in the gloom as he held it high, and then there was a shudder through the room, a loud cracking noise and the obsidian of the floor shattered, shot through with spiderweb cracks, flawed but somehow unbroken, holding its form.

The monster opened one bright eye, uncomprehending, and with a sudden snort rose to its feet, stood two-legged and towered above Josh, its muzzle baring white teeth in a snarl, and Josh forgot the pain, forgot his ankle and his leg and his exhaustion and hunger, felt nothing but pure unfiltered fear, and he ran. The minotaur followed in pursuit, a strange pendant lashed around its thick, furry neck, its claws scratching at the floor. It gained on him quickly, having a much greater stride, and its claws unsheathed, swiped a line across Josh's shoulderblade, flaying the back of his shirt to ribbons, slicing through his skin to send stripes of hot blood running down his spine.

The pain took several moments to catch up with him, more than long enough for Josh to sprint away and around, to lean against a pillar and try to gasp in great heaving breaths with as little noise as possible. His mouth had gone terribly dry. The knife in his hand sang to him. The minotaur, having lost the human target from its line of sight, howled, and the pillars shook.

Josh peeked around the pillar, gulping air, and saw the bassinet there, untouched, undisturbed, and the tiniest morsel of relief ate away at his fear, leaving enough room for the pain to creep in. The monster was growling now, a low roar that assaulted his mind as the claws had assaulted his body, and he fought to stay upright, to keep his head clear, to push the encroaching dizziness away with everything he had left within him.

There, the monster prowled, having momentarily turned its back to him in its search, and he took the opportunity as it presented itself, _the best defense is a good offense_ and _better to surprise it than to let it surprise you_ , and the knife quivered in his hand as his feet beat the floor, surprising even himself with his ability to move in this damaged body, the wetness soaking through what remained of his shirt. The minotaur fell upon him with a roar, lunging, nostrils flared, and its arm came down on Josh's arm, the knife clattering to the floor, something in his wrist popping - was that bone? - he wouldn't look at it, tucked and rolled, agony building to a shriek up his shoulder as the beast's teeth raked across his other arm, leaving deep scratches that immediately brimmed red with blood.

 _What more do I have to give?_ he wondered, his limp hand held tightly to his chest, but even as he looked down he found that the knife was in his left hand now, his fingers nearly fused to its handle, as if he could not drop it even if he had wanted to, and the monster had unbalanced, had fallen into a clumsy heap. Josh hesitated, caught between fight-or-flight impulses, the thundering of his heartbeat in his ears drowning out any pain or even rational thought. The minotaur screamed, and Josh flinched, took several steps back, found a pillar to lean against and moved around it, gulping air into a mouth dry as dust, keeping it between himself and the minotaur, hoping to fool it again.

Silence as the creature untangled itself, rose to balance on its hands and feet, and Josh felt fear clamp icy fingers around his heart. _If I die here am I gone forever?_ He listened for anything other than the monster's snuffling in the eerie silence, waiting for unkind laughter to fill his ears, but there was nothing. Jareth had withdrawn further than his mind for this final test. Then, a single choked sob, an infant's cry, and Josh whirled to look for the bassinet.

There it was, still and quiet again, pristine even in its obvious age, and he squinted, trying to see past the bonnet of it, curling delicately over the bed. And then a scratching of claws on the floor, and he knew it was time for round three, and he knew that round three would be the last round, and the knife was hungry and hot in his hand and he felt the end of his fight encroaching, the drop of the guillotine's blade.

There, the minotaur, bent low to the ground, and here, launching himself on unsteady legs, the labyrinth's Theseus, blade clumsily outstretched and actually _humming,_ a sound that traveled up through his arms and into his chest, resonating at some unknown frequency and Josh could feel it, could taste the victory and it tasted like blood and salt and ash on his dry tongue.

The minotaur turned, a beat too late, and Josh drove the blade of the knife upwards awkwardly with his non-dominant hand, encountering more resistance than he'd expected, sawing desperately through the bulging muscles in the monster's abdomen until the blade ground up against bone, his hands covered in the flood of hot red-black blood, only faintly aware that tears were running down his own cheeks, and the monster, enraged, howled and screamed and roared above him, frothing at the mouth, speckling Josh with spittle until it managed to maneuver its arm far enough and fast enough to connect solidly across Josh's ribs with an ear-splitting crack.

The breath rushed out of his chest with a horrible guttural noise that reached his ears as if he had not been the one to make it, and he felt a terrible crunching as his chest partially gave way beneath the onslaught of the monster's fist. _Such a human thing to do_ , he thought distantly, and watched the monster collapse, its clawed hands pressed to its own bloody stomach, holding its innards in, and without even drawing his next breath he fell upon its back, his left fist sinking the blade between its shoulderblades with renewed strength borne out of terror and desperation, sending up small dark geysers of blood, scraping against the bone of its spine, and it bellowed, its huge body tilting below him, but Josh managed to hold on with his knees and plunge the wicked point of the knife into the soft spot where the monster's neck met its shoulders, slicing through muscle to bury itself there to the hilt, which nearly disappeared in the monster's coarse fur.

A great deflating, a sort of sighing throughout the room, and the rushing in his ears cleared as his lungs cried out for air, and he pressed his good hand to his mangled chest, drew a shallow breath, then another, then another, and then he slid from the minotaur's broad back and knelt on the ground, fighting the urge to let his mind leave his body entirely, unable to draw in enough breath. Its great hand jumped, the claws extended and bloodied, and Josh felt his stomach lurch and retched emptily, burping and coughing up only green bile and sending his chest into spasms of pain, further complicating his breathing. Lightheaded, he attempted to pull himself to his feet beside the gasping minotaur, but his legs would not support his body, so he crawled, hand over hand, to the blue velvet cradle, and once there, managed to stand on shaking legs to finally see what was inside.

He stumbled back from the bassinet, clawing at his own face in despair. There was no child there, but wrapped in a dingy once-white cloth was a sort of a doll, an effigy with straw-blond hair and crudely drawn blue eyes, scarlet gash of a mouth across what was probably burlap stuffed with grass or feathers.

The keening of the monster behind him was dissipating with the rattling of its final breaths. Josh reached down and picked the doll up, cradled it against his bloody chest with his injured arm. It was oddly heavy. _What does a soul look like?_

"Toby. I'll get you home, Toby. We're going home."

But when he turned, the labyrinth had gone very dark, and the exits to this deathtrap of a room had disappeared. He was sealed in, bricked into the dungeon like poor drunk Amontillado, left here with a knife and a doll and a dying minotaur.

Dizzy with panic, he reached into the pocket of his pants and his fingers touched the smooth surface of the crystal. Apprehension slid sickly into his stomach at the touch of the horrid thing, but he managed to extract it from its hiding place and gazed into it. A single dark fingerprint marred its otherwise unblemished surface. A light grew slowly, flickering in its depths, then building to its former blaze.

The wall before him melted away, and there was a staircase that led up and out, and the labyrinth fell away before him, escorting its Theseus out from its depths. _Thread_ , he thought as he held the crystal aloft and the labyrinth yielded its secrets to him. _The knife was the sword to kill the monster, and the crystal is Ariadne's clew, leading me home_.

For the first time since entering the labyrinth, hope cautiously began to unfold in his heart.

* * *

"Oh, Sarah," he said, and the laughter curling into his voice woke something small and scared deep within me. "Foolish girl. You persist in casting us in your ancient story, and far be it from me to complain: though you forever relegate me to villain, you do leave me some small hope for our own story. But, sweet thing, you disappoint me. So unexpectedly ignorant of the subtleties of the story."

But it wasn't disappointment that was curving his lips like that. I waited, breathless.

"Do recall, won't you?"

I inhaled, slowly, deliberately. I waited for him to continue. The beeping of Toby's monitor metered the silence, his heartbeat a metronome for the cadence of our conversation.

"Who was the Minotaur to Ariadne? Who is the monster you have sent your Theseus to slay? Who is the abomination Asterion, the starry son?"

Toby's hand twitched in mine. The beep from the monitor seemed to lag, synchronized to skip a beat with my own heart, because-

 _Asterion is Ariadne's half-brother._

His smile threatened to split his face open, displaying all of his teeth. Something akin to victory blazed in his eyes, and then suddenly his gaze shifted away from me, over my shoulder, and his smile widened further.

"This has been a most illuminating discussion for you, I'm sure," he said, "But it is time for me to go. Act One has come to a close, and you and I, Ariadne, are destined to meet again. Until next time."

As he winked out of existence, I stared at the heart rate monitor, and the space between each beat lasted an eternity until, finally, the next beat failed to arrive.


	5. Catharsis

**Author's Note** **:** Finished this chapter Sunday night before I heard the news. Tweaked it as much as I could bear this morning; now I'm floating it out. It's titled Catharsis, but I think that neither the chapter nor I have achieved it yet. Love to all. Thank you for everything, David Bowie.

* * *

I traded the room-turned-mausoleum for the mausoleum-turned-temple, the labyrinth celebrating its tragic hero. The boy rose up slowly through the darkness with breathtaking temerity. Most boys running the maze for love fail miserably and near-immediately, reduced to mere shadows of the men they'd thought themselves. Not this one, returning from the heart of the darkness beneath the castle where all creatures fear to tread.

But then, each of us had underestimated the other.

His ascent was halting, slow and labored. He was greatly favoring one of his legs, and his shirt hung in tatters from his shoulders, soaked with fear-scented blood, primal and alkaline and so very inhuman. So he _had_ slain the beast that prowled the tunnels. Most of the goblins would be pleased. Not the ones that had _known_ , of course, but those that hadn't had long since grown impatient with the shrieking and growling from the dungeons.

He lifted his eyes to my face; I noted their haggard glow, the sharp cut of his bones beneath his skin. The maze had not been good to him.

"I beat you," he growled, clutching a dirty bundle of rags to his chest. " _I beat you_."

"Your fight was never with me," I said, inclining my head.

"Who the fuck was it with, then?"

Humans were such self-absorbed creatures, spending their entire lives thinking only of themselves but unable to recognize their own reflections when confronted with the face in the mirror. "My dear boy," I said softly, "Your wish was for yourself and your struggle was with yourself. I have only taken an interest in your story because it dovetails so neatly with mine."

The light in his hand called to me, tugging insistently at the edges of my mind. I tore my eyes from his battered face and plucked the crystal from his hand, which, once separated from its precious cargo, dropped limply to his side as if he had lost the strength to support it. The weight of the crystal was warm and familiar in my hand: a prodigal child returned home, thrumming with satisfaction at our reunion.

"One of mine." It made sense: the reason I was unable to scry him, the ease with which he'd navigated the dungeons after the labyrinth's last dream, the speed of his escape from the chamber below the castle. "You won't have need of it anymore; this is the exit. Such a clever little bird she was, spiriting away one of my own crystals."

He held the musty-smelling rags more closely to his chest and I wondered at it, but stepped aside and watched him lurch unevenly past me. The scent of iron clung sickly to him, underscoring the tang of the blood, but the knife had been left in the dungeon and all that remained was the chain about his neck. With a twist of my fingers, I sent him through, back to the surface, and then I stood and surveyed the labyrinth.

The silence that blanketed it was thicker than usual; its inhabitants felt its aftershocks, the knowledge that a great turning point had been breeched, that a line had been crossed. I felt the stirrings of victory within my chest: the tie that bound Sarah to her unsatisfactory life Aboveground had been severed by the hand of her new lover. My hands remained white as snow, pure and blameless. The efficiency of the gambit pleased me.

The labyrinth sighed, then, breathing its stale air into my lungs, and victory abruptly changed to unease; it was an alien feeling, unfamiliar and uncomfortable, hard to hold steadily in my mind.

 _She'll never love you_.

An echo of a taunt. A residue from the boy's time wandering its halls.

Or was it meant for me?

 _A monstrous thing has happened here._

* * *

I can't remember much of what happened immediately after Toby's heart stopped beating.

How do I put words to the unutterable? How can I sketch grief with the impossible inadequacy of language?

His extinguishing - I couldn't think of it in the familiar terms, perhaps because I was unable to move past denial - anesthetized the warm part of me that was able to feel. In an instant, my life had lost its purpose. My baby brother had been the lynchpin of every one of my motivations. I'd always assumed that the result would be a revitalization as inexplicable as his deterioration, that I'd pay my debts to him and emerge triumphant from the labyrinth a second time.

I should have known that it wouldn't be straightforward. I should have known from the moment he appeared in my bedroom, face full of supercilious anger, and refused to let me enter the maze again.

I remember collapsing to my knees and gasping for breath, my chest binding my lungs far too tightly, but I don't remember whether that was before or after I fled the room, monitor emitting an electronic sound, the dial tone after the unexpected disconnection. The sound still occasionally fills my ears at odd intervals to drive thought from my mind and fill the ensuing space with loss.

 _My brother is gone._

I remember seeing Josh, and wondering whether he was merely illusion. I don't remember when. Maybe it was when the elevator doors opened, and I gazed numbly on his shocked face, bone-white beneath the dirt and grime, unable to process his presence here. Was it I who had been in the labyrinth all along? Was this my nightmare? Had it all been a test?

"Sarah," he said, and to my ears it sounded as if he spoke through water. "Sarah." He reached out and I saw blood, his shirt streaming in ribbons across his strangely misshapen torso. The arm he extended to me was crooked. He pressed something into my arms, speaking indistinctly, and then staggered to the desk, where the nurse on night duty cried out at the sight of him.

I left in the ensuing chaos, slinking out unseen.

I don't know what he told the doctors.

I'd cried at night into my pillow until it was cold and damp against my cheeks, until my eyes swelled up and my eyelids didn't fit back together. I'd cried in the shower, sinking to a crouch and holding my knees. I'd cried until my throat ached, until my chest hurt with the force of each sob. I'd cried my own tears until I was numb, until my heart and soul dried up within me and there was nothing left to give.

I couldn't look at Karen because her face was sunken and waxy, because I saw what we had brought to pass for her and I hated myself for it. What can you say to a mother who has to bury her child?

When Josh showed up at our door, he knew before I said a word.

I'd burned the doll before anyone saw it, horrified by its crude resemblance to Toby, cursing Jareth and the labyrinth and - to my everlasting shame - Josh, for even considering that this sick joke might be the key to helping my brother. I'd watched the sparks fly skyward from the firepit in the snowy backyard, clutching the hood of my jacket around my face, and though I stood upwind and far enough from the small fire to escape the reach of its warmth, a single ember had curled up into the air to burn for an instant against my cheekbone – a pinprick of pain.

Even without the lifeless, useless doll to lend credence to my story, he knew that Toby was gone. There was accusation in his eyes: I hadn't stepped foot in the hospital since Toby's death. I'd barely left my bedroom since Toby's death. The silence in the house was unbroken except for quiet sobbing from the master bedroom at night. And when the knock echoed sharply through the house, I went to the door and opened it, found Josh there with his ankle bandaged and his arm in a sling, and I stepped aside to let him in. I recognized the look in his eyes because it was the same as the one that had greeted me in the mirror until I'd stopped looking. He moved slowly, carefully. The house had temporarily found another invalid.

Neither of my parents asked about his injuries, which was all for the best. When Dad raised an eyebrow upon first seeing him, Josh just muttered "car accident," and there were no further questions. Dad and Karen were drowning in the flood of their own grief, and deep as it was, there was no room for me in it. I exiled myself from their despair.

Josh returned to the spare bedroom, and I made the cold journey alone to retrieve his clothes from the parking garage, leaving his car. It remained, cold and empty and still abandoned, a testament to the lies we were telling and the truths that we weren't. He didn't join me at night; I crept into the guest bedroom after the world had gone quiet and laid against his side, but neither of us touched the other. We were together in our aloneness, and it only increased the isolation that we each felt. We were no comfort to each other, and it was agony, because we comprised two of the three people who knew the truth.

The first night, I dreamt that it was Jareth whose body I laid beside, that his hand splayed warmly over my hip, that his smile curved against my shoulder. He whispered to me through the night, about my throne and my crown and my-kingdom-as-great. I woke to Josh turned away from me, his injured arm held protectively against his own body, and when I reached out, uncertainly, to touch his shoulder, he rocked slowly onto his back and, without opening his eyes, said, "I healed too quickly. Doctors didn't understand it."

I didn't understand it either.

Josh hadn't taken the chain from around his neck since I'd seen him exit the labyrinth. I couldn't blame him for it. He wouldn't talk to me about the time he'd spent Underground, and I couldn't blame him for that, either. He'd returned to me having spent a week in hell only to find that the mission he'd thought complete had been utterly failed.

Karen wandered the halls of the house like a ghost, white-faced and already appearing to be wasting away. The house itself seemed too big, almost oppressive, swallowing each of us with our own burdens of personal misery, never letting us close enough to each other to share the grief perching on our shoulders and chests, stealing our energy and voices, our strength and our breath.

When Karen lost the will to cook, Dad brought home Chinese food, grease crawling its way out from the seams of the little white takeout boxes. I watched Karen grip a pair of splintering chopsticks in trembling fingers to push food around on her plate. Dad took her hand when she gave up, sticking the chopsticks point-down in the rice. I averted my eyes, feeling voyeuristic; I could see the silent rise-and-fall of Josh's chest out of the corner of my eye, but he didn't mirror Dad to reach for my hand. He chewed and swallowed, then brought another mouthful of food to his lips.

"Karen," I began, and Dad's eyes slid to my face. I realized how long it had been since I'd made eye contact with anyone - the last time I remembered meeting someone's gaze was when I'd swung the front door open to allow Josh entrance. Then Karen looked up, and I hated myself.

"Karen, I'm so sorry," I said, and my voice came out sounding harsh and flat. I watched her throat as she swallowed heavily.

"It's no one's fault," she said, jerking her chin upward as if to ward off our platitudes.

I couldn't look at Josh, and I couldn't look at Karen, so I dropped my eyes to my plate. The meal passed in silence, and when it was done, Karen and Dad retired upstairs. Dad kept his hand at the small of her back as they took the stairs, one at a time, and then slid it around to her waist to hold her more securely against him. I finally looked at Josh and his half-empty plate of food.

"It's our fault," I said when they'd gone.

Josh visibly flinched. "It's _his_ fault."

"I never should have tried to go back," I began, but recognized the futility of the argument almost immediately. I had never been wrong about the labyrinth; I just hadn't thought it through to its natural conclusion. I'd woven myself a story and been surprised when it played out to its familiar ending.

"Don't make it about yourself, Sarah," he said sharply, and I felt the words as if he'd slapped me full in the face. "Don't play the martyr."

Angrily, I bit back everything I wanted to say; I knew, somehow, that if I told him that he was just licking his wounds because he'd failed at playing the hero and hadn't sustained the magnitude of the loss that we were feeling, he would walk out the door forever. I wasn't ready to lose the one person who knew the truth.

The second night, I peeled Josh's shirt away from his body and gasped at the sight of his back. He was silent; I reached out, touched the puckered skin around the set of long, white scars down his back and he shuddered, jerked away from me.

Toby did this to him.

It wasn't Toby. The minotaur wasn't Toby. The labyrinth had never had any intention of relinquishing its hold on Toby. The minotaur hadn't been Toby for years. Part of Toby remained within him, but that part of Toby would never have survived outside of the labyrinth. He was destined to wither the instant I wished him away, doomed to become a changeling in either world.

I did this to Toby with my childish stupidity. We did this to Toby with our naive arrogance. And Jareth let us do this to Toby, forever playing his repugnant game.

A growing knot of shame and fear and pain and guilt had built up within me, making me contrary and confused, disoriented when I woke up in the dead of night to my heart beating like a war drum, working its way up into my throat and choking me. I reached around Josh, whose back was perennially toward me, molding my body to his. I slid my hand through his shirt, down the plane of his abdomen. It was damp with sweat, and I felt his heartbeat there, heavy and frantic. My hand inched lower, brushed the warm plane of exposed skin just above the waistband of his pants, and then he caught my wrist and looked over his shoulder, eyes dark and haunted.

"Don't," he said, and he didn't sound regretful or sad or gentle. His voice was like flint, and I drew back immediately. The wall between us grew ever higher.

"Okay," I whispered past the lump in my throat. "We don't have to."

He turned his face away from me, dropped it back into the pillow.

"Josh?"

Silence.

My cheeks burned, and I was fiercely glad for the darkness to hide it, fiercely angry that he was making me ask for this. "Will you hold me?" The words tumbled out on a breath, barely audible, but I knew he had heard me. I saw the muscles along his back and up through his shoulders jump and grow tense. I used to love watching the ripple of them there, but I recognized this for what it was: reluctance.

A shift in the mattress: he'd rolled from his side to his back. I gingerly fit myself to the side of his body, resting my head in the hollow of his shoulder. His arm rested somewhere behind me, just barely failing to make contact down the line of my body. I regretted asking; he wasn't holding me at all. We were two ships passing at dawn, perfectly able to see each other, perfectly isolated.

I dreamt that I walked the labyrinth, but the maze fell easily away before me, ushering me directly to its center. The sky overhead was blue and gauzy with lacy white clouds. Songbirds chirped, though I never saw one, and climbing roses twined along the walls, studding them with fragrant white blooms.

"The labyrinth recognizes her queen," said Jareth, a half-step behind me. "She submits to you - look."

The castle rose sharply before me, white and pristine.

"This isn't the way I remember it," I said. "This isn't the way it was, before."

"You've changed. Why shouldn't she? She only wants to please you."

I looked down; I was wearing white gloves, and my fingers were curled around a crystal. I held it before my face, and within it I saw the grey castle I remembered rising out of the goblin city, its streets strewn with hay, grime and shadows. "I doubt the labyrinth wants to please me," I said, unsettled, and looked back at him.

He smiled, and he slipped the crystal from my fingers. I expected the world to fade into greys and browns, the maze to suddenly twist off into shadows before me, but the castle remained as lovely and white as it had been before he reclaimed his bauble. He was resplendent in simple clothes, soft greys and tawny browns, and he took my hand as we stepped across the threshold of the castle.

We climbed stairs that spiraled until my legs should have burned and my lungs should have strained, but I remained serene and silent beside him. The little circular room that we were eventually turned out into was at the top of one of the higher towers, and he led me to stand before the window.

The labyrinth was beautiful beyond description from where I stood, stone walls gleaming golden in the setting sun as far as I could see. Grassy planes turned to verdant, thick forests that stretched to the horizon in the one direction that I could see the end of the labyrinth. A fountain spouted clean, clear water in the middle of the maze.

"This will all be yours," he said. He stood half-behind me instead of at my side, having released my hand. The fingers of his left hand traced its way behind the shell of my ear, down my neck, across my shoulder.

I drew a long, slow breath. The faint pressure of fingertips down the outside of my arm rendered me sluggish and sleepy.

"Just fear me, love me," he murmured, and though I couldn't see it, I knew the smile that was softening his features. "And this will all be yours."

"At what cost?" I asked. I was growing short of breath - but why?

"I've already told you," he purred.

My heartbeat was beginning to quicken. "I'm already afraid."

"Love me," he said insistently; then - the heady sensation of soft, warm lips beneath my ear, where my jawline began.

"At what cost?" I repeated, and he drew back. His fingers traced down to my wrist, and then his hand slipped into mine.

"Oh, Sarah mine, haven't you already paid?"

My eyes widened with renewed memory. _Toby-_

When I woke, gasping at the return of the anxious nausea that kept me from sleep, Josh's fingers were intertwined with mine.

Karen came to me the next day, twisting a disintegrating tissue in her hands. "I know I haven't been very," she paused, took a breath that only shook slightly as she drew it through her lips, and then met my eyes, "present, lately, and I'm sorry. I know this has been hard on you."

Her apology made me feel horrid, but I grasped at words without finding anything acceptable. "No, Karen, don't-" I began, but she soldiered on.

"I don't want you to think that we're not grateful for you," she said, her eyes bright and brimming. My chest tightened as I watched a tear cling wetly to her eyelashes. "I don't ever want you to think that I don't love you." Her voice trailed off, and I didn't know what to say.

To reassure her that I understood? Would that mean acknowledging that while she had taken up the mantle of mother for me, uncomplaining, she had done so knowing that someone else would always occupy that position in my heart? Would it mean admitting that I understood that I was no replacement for losing her baby, her own and only flesh and blood? That I was a thoroughly unsatisfactory consolation prize?

"I don't think that," I finally managed to say, looking at her mouth instead of her eyes. Her lips were torn and cracked, and I thought of Jareth, and that quiet night in the hospital's waiting room. I thought about how he had always only thought of me with that strange darkness in his eyes.

Karen's arms found me and she hugged me tightly, and I wound my arms through hers to rub awkwardly at her back. Her spine poked starkly through the thin material of her shirt, and I wondered how quickly someone could waste away.

We sat together on the couch, then, after I'd brewed a pot of decaffeinated coffee for us, bitter and black. The mug warmed my fingers, which had turned to ice in this tomb of a house.

"What did you get him for Christmas?" she asked me, her voice brittle.

The ball of guilt that had set up residence somewhere north of my diaphragm gave a renewed twinge. I thought about lying, lifted the mug to my lips and found my mind completely barren. I sipped from the mug and burned my tongue. "I didn't," I said. "I didn't know what to get him." The little boxed Lego set - the dragon - was sitting on the side table, abandoned and unbuilt. I bit my tongue until it bled.

She actually smiled at that, a sad smile but a smile nonetheless. "Last-minute shopping must run in the Williams bloodlines. Whatever you would have ended up getting for him, he would have loved it."

"I know," I said, setting my mug down beside Toby's gift. "I just can't believe-"

"He didn't always have the easiest time of it," Karen said hurriedly, cutting me off. "He struggled with his health. But he loved us, and he knew we loved him. He's better off now. He's whole again."

My eyes stung, but the tears refused to fall. Karen comforting me over the death of her child when I was to blame for all of it - his poor health, his unceremonious death - was more than I could bear.

"They said you were with him when he passed," she said through tears.

"He looked like he was dreaming the whole time, Karen. He was peaceful and still. His hand moved in mine, and then-"

My throat closed off and I couldn't continue with my half-truths about that night in the hospital, with my edited history devoid of Jareth and the supernatural. I didn't think our Toby had been in pain at the end, but I thought of the lonely monster in the maze and I didn't know for sure. I slid closer to Karen on the couch and rested my head against her breast; her hands smoothed my hair as she wept and I prayed for my tears to return.

My prayers, as always, went unanswered.

The third night, I slept alone in my own bed.

* * *

The crossing-over was beginning to take a toll on me. I'd spent many more nights sleepless than these in my history as king, but there was something about the house that she stayed in that drained my reserves. Crafting dreams was child's play, of course, but making sure that she stayed quietly asleep was more difficult than I'd anticipated.

The labyrinth, too, was ensuring that I stayed alert and on edge. Repetitive whispers sighed through its corridors day and night.

 _She will never love you._

After three days of this, I grew angry and spiteful. How dare my creation undermine my authority? My judgment? My ability?

 _She will never love you._

I clenched my fist around the crystal that was playing scenes in my hand. Sarah's stepmother was holding a handkerchief to her face and looking at small coffins; her father had an arm slung tightly around her shoulders.

 _She will never love you._

I whipped my arm out, sending the crystal to crash into a cloud of sparkling glass shards against the wall, which hung in the air for a moment before their slow descent to earth. Subsumed by sudden regret, I sat back in my throne. It had been the crystal I'd reacquired from Theseus: the one that she'd kept during all of those intervening years. The one I'd placed in her hand in the last dream as we walked the labyrinth together.

 _She will_ never _love you._

"She _will_ ," I growled, my hand over my eyes.

I'd watched as the boy had spurned her advances. I took my time in seizing the opportunity; I know an unlocked door when I see it. Patience, despite what the stories might insist, has ever been my most valuable virtue.

Humanity as a whole prefers when I live up to their expectations. The theatrics and glamour of my appearances are delightful to them, if somewhat compulsory, and making an entrance is one of the few perks of my duties - at least where the fickle creatures are concerned. I display some small portion of my power, glamour that intrigues and intimidates, and as they cower before me, I bend them to my will while allowing them to believe that some small part of me is bending to theirs.

 _I've brought you a gift._

When I slipped in corporal form into the Williams' household in the quiet hours between midnight and dawn, it was understated. Unfamiliar to me, already a stranger in a strange land, albeit a nearly omnipotent one, to arrive without the usual trappings: the wind and the thunder and the flashing lights. The house was silent, but I could hear the ghost of the child.

It's complicated, this business of ghosts. He wasn't haunting them. He wasn't even present, not truly. Ghosts are wholly unaware of themselves; they are merely echoes of the past subsisting on their loved ones' memories. The house was steeped in memories of a pallid, bony child moving slowly and carefully through its halls.

The labyrinth had robbed him of his childhood and would have continued to rob him of a meaningful life. Was it not a mercy that I had facilitated his escape?

I allowed myself a moment to linger before the door that opened into Sarah's bedroom, then turned and opened the door into the bedroom I'd visited when she had enlisted the boy to call out to me. He lay in the bed like a dead man, and if it wasn't for the slight movement of his breathing, I might have believed it. The veil of death clung to this house.

He was turned away from the door, disheveled mop of dark blond hair against the pillow, broad lines of his shoulders twisted a little bit to hunch into himself. I'd neglected his dreams while tending to Sarah's, but I had my suspicions that he had been having his own trouble sleeping. The labyrinth has her own way of slipping into the subconscious of its visitors and manifesting herself whenever defenses fall. Nightmares are her specialty.

I crossed the room on silent feet and perched on the edge of the bed. I couldn't help the little smile that crept across my face. He yawned as my weight shifted the mattress beneath him, pressed his good hand into his mouth to stifle it, and slowly rose up out of his fitful sleep. There's a certain quality of taste to the air that changes when they wake, sweetness turning slightly sour. I wet my lips.

Without turning, he groaned irritably. "I thought you were sleeping in your bed tonight."

A tide of anger rose darkly in me. He'd never deserved any of her, not even the scraps she'd thrown him while trying to convince herself that she might love him. "I rarely sleep," I said crisply, and watched his body tense in response to my unexpected visit.

He finally turned to face me and sat up in the bed, waiting for me to continue. His deference was mocking, but I chose to accept it regardless of the spirit in which it was offered.

"You're looking well."

"I guess that was the least you could do."

"I thought it was remarkably generous of me."

He opened and closed his fingers into a fist. I could see the dark line of the iron chain 'round his neck. Clever boy. I lifted my legs onto the bed to cross them at the ankle.

"You killed Toby," he said, scrabbling back and away from me in the bed.

"That's quite backwards. _You_ killed Toby. What's that platitude about horses and water that your kind loves so much?"

His mouth was working angrily. "You could have told us."

"What was to tell? You went into the labyrinth and found the child, just as you'd intended."

"You know what was to tell. You _knew_ I wouldn't have done it if I'd known. You _knew_ that."

It was fascinating to me that his voice had unconsciously taken on a pleading quality. He was looking for forgiveness. He was looking for my absolution, of all things. He wanted me to offer him freedom from blame. I smiled at him, tasting his fear on the air, renewed by the sharpness of my teeth and the transformation of my face into something wilder.

"Joshua, your game was never a child's game. Why must you insist on blaming foul play for your inability to put the puzzle pieces together? We were so very heavy-handed, I and the labyrinth, and you and Sarah. Giving you all of the answers at the outset would have cheapened the narrative."

"A child's life isn't a game token, Goblin King. I was never playing any game."

"What were you doing, then?" I couldn't help myself. He was detestable, taking it upon himself to define perfectly grey terms in stark black and white. I mocked him. "Were you on your hero's journey? Your rescue mission? A matter of life-and-death, was it? Were you trying to play the arbiter? Trying to mete out life and death as you see them deserved?"

"I was trying to help Sarah," he said. "I was trying to save Toby."

"You wield your words carelessly, young man. You were trying to help Sarah, and yet when you wished, you invoked only yourself. You are, in your own right, a champion of the labyrinth now. You wished yourself away and you brought yourself back. Toby was never meant to be a pawn in your game, except that you went looking for him and didn't recognize him when you found him."

"I went in after him and he was a _fucking monster_ ," he gasped. "How could I possibly have recognized him? I only met him a day before!"

"Perhaps," I said delicately, "You ought to have considered that before meddling in the lives of people you didn't know."

He gaped at me. When he found his voice again, his fists were clenched in the sheets. "I didn't even believe you were _real-_ "

"I'm hardly to blame for that error in judgment. You should have believed Sarah when she told you about me."

"If you think, somehow, that she's going to love you after this-"

"My dear boy," I said quietly, "She has been marked as mine since the first day she called to me. I have chosen her; I have come to her each night that she has slept beside you, courting her and demonstrating the extent of the kingdom that she will someday rule. She has been agreeable. Independently of whether or not she comes to love me one day, she will never have the capacity to love you."

Bright red spots grew high on his cheeks. "She's a _person_ , you know, not a _plaything._ Not some trophy to be won."

"Of course I know," I said, and I smiled again. "The labyrinth chooses its own. She will come to me, for she has won me. She most assuredly is not the trophy."

He blinked.

"Leave her. You're no help to her. The time is near for her to be unable to see anything but her brother's murderer when she looks upon you."

"Do you think you're going to fare any better in her eyes?" he asked.

I paused, then rose from the bed in one fluid motion.

"She is _mine_."

* * *

He had finally dispensed with pretense and come to me in my waking hours.

Twisted in the cold blankets, I'd been dreaming that I had my ear pressed to a keyhole, trying to make out the contours of a quiet conversation in low voices, but couldn't quite catch any of the words. I was desperate to know what was being said, but its narrative eluded me, and I was left only with the heavy certainty that something critically important was happening just beyond my grasp.

The door creaked, and my eyes flew open in response. Moonlight was streaming in through the window where I hadn't drawn the curtains; it illuminated the room and caught on the glossy waves of my hair, the light far too bright to be entirely natural. I sat and turned, tugging the neck of my nightshirt up toward my throat.

"Finally brave enough to come see me in person without a dream to set the scene and make me forget?"

His eyes glittered.

"My brother is dead."

"I am well aware."

We faced each other there, miles between us.

"How could you let it happen?"

"Everyone wants a happy ending, Sarah. Are you naive enough to believe that life grants it to each in his own turn?"

"There's a difference between blindly wishing for a happy ending and being unknowingly directed into a tragedy." I was surprised by how clear-headed I was, by how little I felt other than the anger rising in my breast.

"You assigned yourself the tragedy," he said, in that infuriating way that made my pulse race all the faster. "I was not the director. I didn't choose the story. I only rose to meet your expectations."

"Jareth," I said tiredly, and then realized I didn't want to say anything else to him right now. I was exhausted and I didn't want to argue.

He tilted his head, evaluating.

"There are five stages of grief, I'm told," I said, just to have something to say. "Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I know better than to think that you're hiding Toby somewhere in the labyrinth."

He dipped his chin, watching me closely.

"I'm not sure that I've passed into or through any of the other four. I will be angry. I won't bargain. I don't know how the depression will manifest itself. But know this: I will never forgive you for what you've done."

He recoiled, just slightly, and a fierce, hot satisfaction made my fingers shake.

"It wasn't me, Sarah."

"Dodging doesn't suit you, Jareth. None of us are blameless in this."

A crystal materialized between his fingers, spun over the back of his hand, returned to his palm.

"I want to sleep," I said, my eyes fixed on the little sphere.

"I will stay with you," he said. "I will weave you a new dream."

"No, Jareth. I don't want a dream. I want deep, dreamless sleep."

"But I will stay," he said softly. "To ward off the labyrinth's nightmares."

It was my turn to dip my chin in silent acquiescence, and then I turned away from him, felt his weight settle behind me on the bed. His arm encircled my waist, his body nestled into mine, warming me where we touched, his chest to my back, his hips to my hips; for a moment I considered pretending that he was Josh to soothe my conscience, but then I remembered the nights of lying silently, shivering beside Josh, and I chose to think of nothing at all.

I knew it was twisted, lying there beside the king who had helped to orchestrate the demise of my brother, but I had craved nothing more than comforting physical touch from someone - anyone. Hugging Karen made my stomach hurt with unspoken guilt, Dad had been almost completely absent and Josh would barely look at me. Jareth held me like he was afraid I would shatter into pieces, and he brought with him the promise of dreamless sleep.

His bare hand pressed delicately against the plane of my stomach beneath my shirt, and then slowly crawled upward over too-sensitive skin, trailing goosebumps in its wake. I shivered, and he pressed himself more closely to me. His hand, hot and sure, cupped my breast, and my nipple pebbled against his fingers. A fire ignited in my core, stoked ever higher by the shame that I was allowing him to touch me while my brother lay dead and alone and my lover slept in the adjacent room.

His hips pushed more insistently into mine; his breath, uneven, floated across the nape of my neck. His hand traced along my side, the outside of my breast to my waist to my hip and back up, frustratingly slowly. He returned to my breast and plucked at the bud there, sending shockwaves to run down between my thighs, and I gasped and took his wrist. Now it was my turn to refuse.

"Don't," I said.

He was silent, but his hand dropped obediently to my side.

"I want to sleep," I said, and my voice shook. "No dreams."

"No dreams," he agreed, and pressed warm, dry fingers to my temple.

I slept.

When I woke, he was gone. I padded downstairs wrapped in my robe to start a pot of coffee, and everyone else was gone, too. There was coffee in the pot - Karen had left me a bravely cheerful little note about it - and doughnuts on the counter that Dad had retrieved from the corner store, and I picked one up and dropped it onto a plate, watching the puff of powdered sugar settle onto the counter.

When I lifted the pot, though, the coffee was sludgy and burnt, so I ran water from the tap into it instead, listening to the sizzle of the water against the hot glass before I dropped it into the sink.

Josh wasn't around, either. He'd been wandering off during the days, a weird interloper in our mourning. It wasn't that I didn't think he deserved to grieve. I recognized the horrific experience he'd been through. In many ways, he'd had it worse than anyone, and had the literal scars to prove it. But the fact always remained, indisputable, that he hadn't lost Toby in the same way that we'd lost him.

The window over the sink opened onto our yard, blanketed in a fresh snowfall, pristine and almost too bright to look at without squinting. The boughs of an evergreen laden with heavy drifts of snow bent to frame the upper left corner of the window. It could practically have been a painting. I heaved an enormous sigh and turned from the sink.

I was no longer alone. The radiant woman from the waiting room was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, and various expressions were warring in her face. I, for my part, had thought I'd grown used to unusual visitors, but Jareth's visits were an old friend popping in for a quick chat compared to this jarring intrusion. For a moment, I saw jealousy, resentment and anger writ large in the shadows of her face, and I had no trouble at all believing that she wished me ill.

Then she regained composure, and her eyes swam in sorrow, and she gently reached out to me. Her gown rippled like water as she moved. I stepped forward, painfully aware of the tatty strings dangling from the sleeves of my robe and suddenly angry.

"What are you doing here?" I asked her. "Don't you know it's rude to drop in on people who are in mourning? You could have at least brought a casserole."

"Shall we have tea?"

"Well, the coffee was a bust." I slipped into a chair at the table, watching her closely, and she returned the favor, liquid eyes fixed on my face. "I'm not going to make tea, so I guess that's up to you."

"I'm not your enemy, Sarah," she said, and between her fingers swirled a light that resolved itself slowly into a small milk-white tea set; a creamer, a sugar bowl, a teapot and two cups on matching saucers. "I only want to help you."

I reached out for a teacup, but she gently batted my hand away. The set was edged in silver and tiny cobalt-petaled flowers spiraled across its every flawless surface. Steam rose in whorls from the spout of the teapot as she lifted it and poured out a cup. "Milk? Sugar?"

"Why not?" I asked, and watched her pour milk from a tiny creamer, then pick up a sugar cube with a doll-sized pair of silver tongs and drop it into the teacup before sliding it to sit in front of me. I immediately picked up the little silver spoon on the saucer and fished the sugar cube out of the teacup to examine it.

"I had to supply my own," she said, shrugging prettily as she poured herself a cup. "You can't get quality sugar here."

Rather than white, the sugar cube was almost clear, perfectly geometrical, taking its time to melt into the tea. It was a single crystal, not the compressed granulated sugar I was used to seeing. I lowered it back into the tea and swirled it around with my spoon, making satisfying clinking noises against the china.

"Did you come here to blame me for my brother?" I asked her, still stirring the tea.

"Of course not. I came here to make sure that you weren't unwise in your grief. I'm terribly sorry about your brother." She took a sip of her tea, her lips vividly red against the white of the teacup. They left no mark there as she replaced it on her saucer.

"I'm having trouble understanding your investment in my personal matters," I said slowly. "Who are you, again?"

"Someone who is trying to look out for you. You're not in your right mind. Something awful has happened to you, but you must try not to give in to your weakness in your grief."

"You aren't answering my question. Why do you care about whatever you think my weakness is?"

"I loved him, once," she said, and I had no trouble believing the sorrow that flooded her eyes anew. "Maybe I still do." She paused and sniffed the air, then reached out and took a lock of my hair between her fingers, brought it to her nose and inhaled deeply. "His scent is on you," she said, her eyes narrowing. "He has been here recently. You should know better."

"Maybe you should mind your own business." I finally raised the cup to my lips and drank, and it was unlike any tea I'd ever had before. Thick, somehow, rich and comforting, faintly sweet with the sugar cube still slowly dissolving. I decided against thanking her. "I'm sure Jareth would agree with me."

At the sound of his name, her eyes widened and her face drained of all color, and then there he was, reclining insouciantly in one of the dining room chairs. I fought the impulse to roll my eyes, wondering at the complete deadening of my emotion.

"Sarah," he said, inclining his head and flickering his fingers to magic himself a matching teacup. "I trust you slept well."

"I suppose you know that I did."

"Kind of you to invite me to your little gathering. Our mutual friend has a trifling grasp on magics, but it doesn't stop her from siphoning off of you to cloak herself. The tea is marvelous," he said, "but I find it lacking. Would you be so kind as to pass me the sugar bowl?"

The lid rattled as she lifted it and handed it to him, taking care that her fingers did not brush his. He bypassed the tongs entirely, plucking one of the translucent cubes from the dish with gloved fingers. Holding it for a moment, he considered it. "So you thought you'd pay my Ariadne a little visit? See how she was holding up after the events that unfolded in our home country?"

"To say you've done her a disservice would be to put it too lightly," she snapped, slamming her teacup down so that milky tea sloshed over its edge to pool in the saucer.

"So you're here to help her recover with tea and positive thinking, are you?" His eyes flashed. "Sarah, did she pour your tea for you?"

I considered my teacup with faint horror. "Yes," I said, and he reached out, snatched it from my hands.

"Oh, don't be ridiculous," she said, casting off her fear in favor of indignation, taking the cup from him and replacing it in front of me. "I would never poison her. It would be a far greater blow to succeed in turning her against you. I would have you know every moment that she exists here, every moment of her short, mortal life is another moment spent choosing to reject your crown, your hand, and your company. That she might exist here and live a life devoid of you by choice would be a far more painful punishment for you than her untimely death."

His smile grew wolfish; he placed the sugar cube on his tongue and drew it into his mouth, and I could hear it clicking against his teeth. "You would make it your life's work to see that mine goes undone. Surprisingly noble, if misguided. Pragmatic, even."

I sipped my tea, which was growing cold but no less nourishing. Jareth put his feet up on the table. The woman refilled my cup. Jareth sipped from his, still knocking the sugar cube around in his mouth.

"He's not sorry about your brother," she said, and my gaze lingered on Jareth for long enough to see something volatile spark in his face before catching the resolve in hers. "He's glad that Toby's dead."

"It is a great shame," Jareth said, enunciating fastidiously around the sugar cube, "that your brother is gone."

As always with Jareth, it was what he didn't say that was particularly telling. I wasn't sure whether or not he was incapable of lying, but he certainly had a distaste for it. My stomach turned.

"Jareth," I said, "Are you glad that Toby is dead?"

His eyes were stormy, and his mouth worked for a few seconds, clearly looking for words and aware that he was navigating a minefield. "He would never have lived a fulfilling life, Sarah."

"Are you saying it was a _mercy killing_?" I asked, only dimly aware that my voice was rising to a shriek but painfully aware that he hadn't denied it. What was the right question? What would tell me what I needed to know? "Why not by your own hand, Jareth? Why wait for Josh?"

I could see the woman leaning forward, chin propped on her hands, elbows resting on the table. She practically exuded victorious anger. I hated her for it, more than I hated Jareth but less than I hated myself.

"There is a natural order to the Underground," he said, crunching on the sugar, swallowing. "You may find it difficult to believe, but I am occasionally forbidden from meddling too much in affairs in the labyrinth. I cannot take action until the time is right."

I drank most of the tea before me, then half-dropped my teacup onto the saucer where it rattled noisily for at least a beat too long. The woman leaned further forward, an unpleasant smile cutting her face into pieces that didn't quite fit together. "Why don't you tell her why Toby's death fit so neatly into your scheming, Goblin King?"

I waited. The autocratic tilt to his chin did little to dull the impact of his next words. "Sarah, I would have you rule at my side. What is there left to keep you here now?"

I tried to catch my breath because my lungs were collapsing; the scene before me was surreal and a headache was violently needling its way into my left eye. I'd inadvertently caused the death of my little brother because Jareth thought he loved me? The woman reached across my body to take my cup from where it sat before me.

"Shall I read your tea leaves?"

Still trying to catch my breath, Jareth forgotten only for a moment, I stared at her. "There aren't leaves in the cup."

Her smile was enigmatic, would have rendered her even lovelier except that I hated her so intensely that my hands were shaking. "Aren't there?" With a fluid movement of her wrist, she swirled the cup three times and then tilted it to decant a small amount of liquid into the saucer and set it on the table upside-down.

When she flipped it over, she turned it to me so that I could see the leaves in crisp patterns arranged around the cup, and when she turned it back to herself, her eyes narrowed in concentration. "Danger and deceit; an uncomfortable discovery; an untrustworthy person near to you; a death, sooner than you think; regression. You are doomed to be unlucky in love, and though your story will end in tragedy, your standing will be much improved-"

Jareth deftly extracted the teacup from her hand and dropped it onto the floor, where it shattered. "Now, now. Dispense with the nonsense if you have nothing nice to say. Your people are not skilled in the gift of divination, and the leaves did not belong to Sarah."

I stood, unsteadily. Jareth rose, his hand at my elbow, and I shrugged him off. "Don't follow me," I snapped, my hand on the stairway banister. The last I saw of the two of them before my eyeline was obscured was Jareth clearing the table with a sweep of his arm and then rounding on her, fury etched into each movement of his lithe body.

In the bathroom mirror, I glared at the girl wrapped in the old robe until my head hurt too much to think, and then I palmed four aspirin and dry-swallowed them.

That night, I crawled into bed beside Josh, remembering the way he had held me on our first night here, fresh from a semester that now seemed to have ended ages ago, before we'd summoned Jareth and reinvited his intrusion into my life.

Predictably, this time, as with the others, he neither talked to me nor touched me, but his presence bought me Jareth's absence.

And when I slept, I dreamt that I was flying.


	6. Apotheosis

I'd never given much thought to funerals before.

I'd never attended one that I could pin a specific memory to. I'd never been especially personally affected by a death. My grandparents were hale and hearty, all three sets of them, as the mountain of presents beneath the tree at home could attest. Half of them had 'Toby' written in shaky script on merry little tags that fluttered even in the stillness.

During one of the many grey hours that stretched interminably on since everything had changed, I'd turned each one of them inward so that the name wasn't visible. I didn't quite dare to stack each gift to the deceased in the garbage can, one on top of the other, incongruously bright among kitchen scraps and used tissues, so flipping the tags had to suffice. Baby steps. One foot in front of the other, stumbling toward the eventual and complete erasure of the cornerpiece of my life.

If I could take it all back - if I could do it all again - if I could reorder time -

Josh took my hand as I stepped out of the car, and I jumped as his fingers closed around mine. They were cold and just the tiniest bit clammy, but he went on holding my hand long after I was steady on the ground. I looked up and met his eyes, and for the first time since the witching hour on the night that changed everything, I saw something other than haunted condemnation there.

The absence of blame in Josh's face threw me off-kilter. Now that I might have his sympathy, I didn't want it. I deserved to be reviled. I'd managed to weasel out of having to do a reading at the service. I didn't want to stand up there, before a jury of everyone Toby had ever known, and witness the pity in their eyes. Josh had offered to read something when he had seen Dad and Karen huddled over the crinkling paper of the family Bible, and Karen had looked up at him gratefully, her eyes swimming.

I'd turned away, stepped back into the shadows as he lifted the holy book gingerly from the table and assured them that he would pick something.

The pews were filled with spectres from my childhood, all shrouded in black: old friends, old enemies, old flames. Middle-aged couples who had come over in the evenings to play cards with Dad and Karen over expensive scotch that, to my uncultured nose, smelled like nothing so much as new sneakers. Babysitters, old women who used to pinch color into my cheeks, every person I could ever remember seeing on any of my infrequent visits to church.

They fell silent as we entered. The urge to scream built in my throat, scratching at my trachea like a caged animal. Here we were, walking quietly down the aisle like some kind of royal procession. All eyes on the handsome farm boy and the lovely schoolgirl. The restless murmurs in the church gave way to pregnant silence, the naked pity in their eyes feeding the rising tide of hatred that was corroding my insides. I heard my shoes click against the floor, the too-loud noise persisting despite every effort I made to step lightly.

Roses were piled high on top of the small coffin, and I kept my eyes fixed on them as we moved forward, Josh a solid presence at my side. Most of them still only buds, their tips tinged with color: whites and reds, snipped from the vine before they'd even begun to unfurl. It all seemed a bit heavy-handed to me.

We took our seats in the frontmost pew, and his arm laid along my back, curling around my shoulders. I leaned into him; he smelled like the bar of soap in the shower, like my father's aftershave, clean and familiar but not like himself. He looked straight ahead, his eyes the color of the cloudless sky, almost transparent from this angle. The set of his jaw was hard. A muscle beneath his eyebrow twitched. He was looking at Toby. I was looking at him.

The pastor said a few somber words, and then I felt Josh rising from his seat beside me. Chill leached into me where his warmth had been a moment ago. The soles of his shoes peeked dustily up at me as he ascended to the pulpit. In his hand he held a little red leatherbound book.

My heart turned over in my chest. I felt short of breath. He opened it, pressed it flat against the pulpit, took a deep breath and smoothed the pages. The sanctuary was so quiet that the rustling of the pages filled the space, the insectile noise of ancient, papery wings rubbing together.

 _Once upon a time,_ I thought. _The king of the goblins had fallen in love with the girl._

Josh cleared his throat. His voice was scratchy. It seemed to me as if I hadn't heard it in days, and a depth of feeling welled up in me, his voice an unexpected oasis in the parched desert of my self-flagellation. "I will be reading from Matthew 18," he said, "Beginning with verse 1." He swallowed, drew a breath.

I relaxed, just a hair. _It's only a Bible._

"At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, 'Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?'"

 _my kingdom as great_

"And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, 'Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.'"

 _give me the child_

"'But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!'"

My eyes met his as his voice rose in feverish intensity, and the condemnation that had left his face was spilling out of his voice, condemning himself, condemning Jareth. The people in attendance sat eerily spellbound. I floated, disconnected and distant. He continued with the condemnation meant for me in that same frenzy of feeling.

"'Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hellfire.'"

 _the king of the goblins had fallen in love with the girl_

 _the young girl was practically a slave_

'"Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.'"

 _the king of the goblins would keep the baby in his castle forever and ever_

"'How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray."

 _give me the child_

"'Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.'"

The lines around Josh's mouth grew deep and white; he closed the book and stood with his head bowed for a moment, and when he looked up and into his stunned audience, his eyes snagged on something and his face turned whiter still in anger. I turned, expecting to see an inhumanly beautiful face, but I saw only a sea of black mourning clothes and unsettled faces, tissues clutched tightly in fists and a breath that had been drawn but not released.

Josh settled back in beside me, drew me near to him, but he was rigid and tense. He bent to my ear and whispered, "I chose the reading for us."

I tried to pull away, to gain even just an inch or two of distance from him, but his arm kept me close and out of fear of making a scene, I sat perfectly still: equally rigid, equally tense.

We were identical magnetic poles, cut from the same cloth and helpless to do anything but repel each other because of it.

* * *

The tradition of the funeral is beyond my comprehension. It is self-indulgent nonsense.

They gather to remember. They pretend they are celebrating the life of the deceased, but they celebrate only their own lives, tenuously brought together by shared but impersonal tragedy, offering up recollections of inconsequential moments when their existence brushed up against his.

They dress in black and cry into handkerchiefs and insist that he has moved on to a better place. They spout self-serving, meaningless platitudes in quiet, wavering voices that provide comfort to only themselves, and as the empty words tumble over their lips, they privately consider how grateful they are that their son or brother or loved one isn't the reason they've congregated in this sacred place.

But each and every one has failed to cherish their children the way that children ought to be cherished, and though one in a million manages to hit upon the correct combination of words, summoning me from my throne to appear before them and take the child - very nearly relegating me to one of Aesop's fables, though the stories that invoke my hand seldom manage such a neat conclusion - each and every one has wished away a child in a moment of selfishness, weakness, darkness and discontent. Each has deserved to learn my hard-taught lesson.

Every last one has fallen pitifully short in the familial duties of guardianship and love. And they remember their failings here, caught between the shifting shadows in the pews, rays of sunlight streaking through stained glass to paint their faces in crimsons and golds and blues, and they silently celebrate the lives of their surviving progeny as they gather to participate in the unspoken sacrament of mourning.

But, of course, since that unfortunate, explosive meeting - over tea, of all things - that tore the quietude in the grieving household to shreds like shrapnel, I have kept my distance. I will come to collect, but today is not that day. Her wounds are invisible, but raw and weeping, and the scent of them fills this place. Something of hers has died, something other than the small body in the small box at the front of the church, and she is not prepared to let it go, though it rots within her.

Still, I felt compelled to attend the funeral. After all, his spectre haunted the halls of my labyrinth for as long as his sickly presence endured here. I was unexpectedly connected to him. Toby, fate's golden thread, running from her desperate, restless soul to mine.

What is it that they say? Gone, but not forgotten.

I arrived at the church early, masked beneath a simple glamour, and laid a single long-stemmed Osiria rose on Toby's coffin that would soon be buried beneath more flowers. Toby, Sarah's very heart, still and cold. I laid a hand on the varnished wood for a moment, but felt nothing, and then I turned and took a seat in the center of the sanctuary.

Besides Sarah's unassuming entrance on the boy's arm, eyes empty and downcast, the wait was nearly interminable. She swept in, looking more wraith than maiden, supported by the pale shadow of the young Theseus who had survived my labyrinth only a few days before. They took their seats and I watched the dark ripple of glossy hair down her back as she shifted her weight into him.

The pastor spoke in more platitudes, until I wondered how Sarah could possibly bear the weight of even one more empty word without protest. And then Joshua took the stage.

Though courtesy, and, I'm given to understand, deference demand it not be referred to as such, it assuredly is a stage. I am older than the bones of this dusty church. There must be a limit to deference. And there he stood before the crowd, his voice amplified to reach even the cobwebbed corners of this room, and read from his holy book.

A smile crossed my lips. He had known that I would be here. Or he had hoped that I would be here, or suspected that I would be here while hoping that I would not. His passage had been chosen not for Toby, but for himself, and most of all for Sarah and myself. I looked to Sarah, saw the tension along the willowy lines of her arms and neck.

Joshua's voice faded into nothingness, a slight reverberation remaining in the vaulted space. I cast my eyes up to his face and caught defiance there. I allowed the glamour masking me to slip for a moment, and recognition met me readily, drawn and white and angry. I tugged it back into place before Sarah whirled in her seat, trailed her gaze curiously across my face, not pausing once in her search. Though I almost expected it from my former champion, her untrained eyes were unable to see through my disguise and did not snag on me even briefly. But I saw hope struggling to unfurl, buried deep in the recalcitrance there.

And when he returned to sit beside her and draw her close, I watched her flinch away from him.

Her scent was restlessness and indignation, fear and fury, lightning crackling through charged atmosphere.

* * *

I didn't think about how little help I had been to Dad and Karen until I realized that I had no idea what I was supposed to do at the funeral, or when it would be over, or what I was supposed to do when it ended. Luckily - or maybe unluckily - for me, I was too consumed with how uncomfortable I was in my proximity to Josh to consider how the service droned infuriatingly on and on.

There was a closing prayer. I bowed my head and tried to wedge my elbow between our bodies to leverage myself some extra space. I resented Josh for taking Toby's funeral as an opportunity to deliver me a pointed lecture in disguise in front of the aged convoy of my childhood.

As the prayer drew to its unbearably slow close, the energy in the room changed, shifted. People were reaching for coats and purses, beginning to whisper to each other and move for the door. I couldn't blame them. I would have made a run for the door, myself, if I could have managed it.

"Stay for a minute," Josh whispered to me, and rose from his seat, shaking some hands. He was looking for Jareth - it was written so plainly on his face that he might as well have literally written it there with a felt-tipped pen - but he wouldn't find him. If I'd learned anything about Jareth in the past few years, it was that he didn't come when he was called, and he didn't present himself when he was being sought after.

I sat quietly, my head bowed, praying - not _praying_ , precisely, for how could I call out to a god that I wasn't sure was listening when I was too-intimately-acquainted with the devil that was? - that no one would interrupt me or come to offer their respects. The noise around me grew muffled and my vision blurred; my chin dipped and I jolted awake to see the child-sized coffin before me.

"Sarah," Josh said patiently, as if he'd been saying it for some time now, and his hand fell on my shoulder, then slipped down to my elbow to help me up.

"Your reading was unconventional," an older woman said, approaching him as the congregation filed slowly out. I didn't recognize her.

"It was an unconventional funeral," he said, leaning hard on the word _unconventional_ with the barest hint of a snarl in his voice. "A child is dead."

"May angels lead him in," she murmured, eyes somber.

"Angels," I said, and my voice was louder than I'd intended it to be, "have _nothing_ to do with it."

"Forgive her - she was with him when he passed." Karen - how long had she been there? - laid a gentle hand on my arm. "There was nothing anyone could have done, Sarah. It's all right. Toby is at peace. You must stop blaming yourself."

"It isn't," I said wretchedly, and twisted away from her. "Toby's dead, and it isn't all right." Josh's hand closed tightly on mine, grinding the bones together until I nearly yelped in pain, halting my retreat. I looked up into her face, expecting her expression to be stricken, but instead, she looked almost serene, albeit exhausted.

"I know it's been a difficult day. We'll meet you at home. Don't worry about it."

"I'll stay here for a bit," I said, raggedly.

"She'll get home all right," said Josh.

"I just need to sit down for a minute, and then I'll go outside and get some air."

Karen nodded, stroked her hand down my arm and then turned to graciously accept more condolences. I sat, holding my face in my hands and wondering at my inability to find the tears I'd previously been unable to stop. My emotions were dead and barren. Outside, the sun was setting, turning the stained glass to prismatic fire, and Josh stood beside the pew where I sat, a silent sentinel. No one else approached him about his reading; people filed slowly out of the room until we were left there together and alone.

I shivered as the door closed for the last time, ushering in one last blast of wintry air that stirred the hair around my face, and Josh pressed the palm of his hand against my spine at the base of my neck. I jerked away from it, and when I met his eyes I found wounded defenses there.

"Don't look at me like that."

"Why...?" he trailed off, searching for words. "Are you afraid of me?"

"You haven't touched me in days," I said. "Why should I let you do it now, on your terms?"

"I'm not trying to hurt you, Sarah," he said quietly.

"What was that reading about, then?"

"It was about children -"

"It was about me," I said, tiredly. "It was about me, and it was about you, and it was about Jareth."

He went still and sullen, and I stared at him, trying to find the boy I'd met two months ago somewhere beneath the scars. I could barely recognize him, not even the stubborn set of his jaw that I knew should be familiar. Without the easy grin, the lust for life, the infectious enthusiasm, he had become a stranger to me. Disconcerting, that a stranger should know so much.

"It was inappropriate," I said, watching color faintly stain his cheeks in response to chastisement. "It was selfish and self-serving. You used his funeral to point fingers at us?"

"No one else knew. And it was our fault."

I stripped the skin from my lip with my teeth as I looked up at him, probed the newly exposed layer with my tongue. "So you wanted to get in one last jab at him?" He opened his mouth to protest, but I interrupted before he could start. "Don't play dumb. It isn't a good look for you. I saw your face. You saw him. He was here, wasn't he?"

"Did you want him to be? I saw you look for him." The sudden frenzy in Josh's face sliced through the fog of despair that had settled over me following the funeral service, but what rose to the surface to replace the lethargy was not affection. "Do you love him?" He roused my ire, setting me back on defensive haunches.

"Do I love who?" I asked, and my voice was steady and dangerous. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

"Do you love him?" Each word was carefully metered out, enunciated, giving me no room to wiggle around his intended meaning.

"He _murdered_ my brother."

" _I_ killed your brother," said Josh, and his voice was flat and his eyes were dead. "I did. Not him. Me. I murdered Toby."

"He tricked you into it," I said, though my heart was breaking.

 _Did I?_ I could hear the question I knew he'd ask with that terrible expression on his face, that smug self-satisfaction that made me want to strike him with my open hand. _I don't believe I set out to trick anyone. Humans are so quick to shift the blame from their own shoulders. Your impulsive Theseus has only himself to blame._

"He thinks he's done all of this for you, you know."

"All of what, exactly?" I snapped, rising to my feet. "This is his generosity all over again, is it? Taking you into the labyrinth, tricking you into killing my brother, turning you against me, sending you back like this?"

"One rarely emerges from the Underground unscathed," he said in a high-pitched voice, and then his eyes widened as an ear-splitting crack halted his mocking speech. My palm tingled painfully, and there was a reddening weal already spreading, raised and blotchy, across his cheek.

"Stop it!"

"You sent me in. You set me up as your sacrificial lamb, sent me in there with a murder weapon and a magical crystal and expected me to come out carrying your brother like Hercules with Cerberus, but that's the _wrong myth_ , isn't it, Sarah? And in the meantime you've been having many lovely chats with His Majesty, have you? While I've been struggling through that damned maze?"

"I can't control him. You should know that. I don't decide when he comes and goes. And you shouldn't believe everything he says. You know what he wants."

"Do you know that he intends to have you for his queen?"

I'd never thought about it directly, but when I allowed myself to look right at it instead of obliquely around it, I found that I had always known that he intended to have me one way or another. It made me furious.

"What about _my_ agency? What if I don't want to be with him? What if I don't want to give him what he wants? What if I want to be with you, and leave him and the labyrinth behind forever? What if I want to try to move on with the rest of my life?"

"Do you?" he asked, and I felt sorrow surge up within me, robbing my anger of its power. His whole body slumped in defeat, his eyes haunted, his good hand loose and restless at his side.

"Of course I do." The words felt hollow on my tongue, but that wasn't unusual: since Toby's death, all words felt hollow.

"Do you love _me_?"

My heart thudded inside my chest. "I could try," I said. I couldn't tell whether or not I was lying.

"I don't know if I can move on from here with you."

"You don't know if you can move on with me? You came back from the Underground carrying a grotesque little Toby doll that you shoved into my arms as if it would fix all of my problems, as if my brother wasn't already _dead_ at your hand, by a weapon that was meant for protection, and you tell me that you don't know if _you_ can still be with _me_?"

A brief pause.

"Are you so sure you would have known him, if you'd been me down there, facing off against a monster in the bowels of the maze, playing a part in some twisted myth?"

"He was my brother," I said, setting my jaw, "and I loved him. I would have known him anywhere."

Another pause, longer this time: a standoff. The invisible line between us had grown to a wall that rivaled anything that the labyrinth had to offer. We stared at each other through narrowed eyes, breathing shallow and fast.

"Jareth can have you, Sarah," said Josh. "I can't do this anymore."

"Josh, wait," I said, and the words caught in my throat, choking me, and I wondered - not for the first time - how we'd ended up here, having only really known each other for less than two months. I wondered about Ariadne and Theseus, and I wondered about the way our lives insisted on dovetailing with a story that was several millennia older than we were, and I wondered how much of it had been orchestrated by Jareth, pulling on magical puppetstrings and manipulating us like human marionettes, just another amusing diversion to him.

But I knew that our story wasn't a diversion to him, that his intentions were clearer and more straightforward than they had ever been before, and I knew that in this wager, it was my captivity against his loneliness. And worst of all, I didn't know what I wanted as hot resentfulness building in the cavity beneath my ribs where my heart had once been until there was no room for anything else.

"If I don't leave now," he said, his eyes bright, "I don't know what will happen to me. I don't know what will happen to me either way, but at least I've got a chance if I leave now."

"You can't leave," I said lamely. "I don't understand how to move forward. My brother is dead."

"Do you think that's not going to haunt me for the rest of my life? None of this should have been real! Goblins don't exist, Sarah, and magic isn't real, but somehow Toby is dead and somehow it's my fault. I'll never be able to look at you and not be reminded that I did this. I wish I'd never met you."

My lips had formed an o, utterly lost for words, but in truth, I wished the same.

"He can _have_ you," Josh spat.

He thrust something into my hand and then he was storming out, opening the door too roughly and hurrying down the sidewalk, and the door didn't even give us the courtesy of slamming behind him, but rather caught itself and eased slowly shut with a tiny click, and the emptiness beneath my breast expanded until I beat it back savagely, sinking into the pew and staring at the scuffs along the sides of my black shoes. In truth, I felt nothing.

I opened my hand after he'd gone, and the iron chain slithered from it like something alive to pool silver on the floor, reflecting the light of the setting sun through stained glass, burning blood-red into my retinas until I could only see flecks and flashes of light on the inside of my eyelids.

I walked home in the cold, slowly, the chain clenched in my fist like a talisman. Once or twice I thought I caught the flickering edges of a shadow creeping up behind me or heard footsteps just slightly out of sync with my own, but I tightened my fingers around the chain - the only thing I had left of our twisted story - until it left dark indents in my skin, and I didn't turn around, but stared determinedly at my own feet in the dying light until I found myself at the foot of my own driveway.

My car was parked crookedly in the driveway. I laid my hand on the hood, but I wasn't sure if the barest hint of heat remained there or if I was imagining that it was anything other than cold to my touch. Josh had driven it home, probably when he'd discovered that my keys were in his pocket. I could imagine him, frozen as his fingers touched them, wretched with shame but not desperate enough to try to find me on his way back. It hadn't been a short walk. He'd had plenty of time to beat me home. The door was unlocked; I closed it gently behind myself. His shoes and his coat were conspicuously absent, and my keys were lying in a silvery heap where I'd left his keys on the table in the hallway. Presumably he'd caught the bus out to the garage, retrieved his car and fled from us. He was gone.

The night passed fitfully. I kept the chain beneath my pillow, reluctant to wear it around my neck for fear that it would strangle me in the night, and I drew the curtains tight across the windows. Karen and Dad had gone to bed before I let myself back into the house, and I fell asleep to the low dirge of her sobbing. In the morning she was wan and taciturn. She'd put on a tremendously strong face for the funeral, but Toby was in the ground now and she was falling to pieces.

I didn't have to explain Josh's absence to them, the guest room empty, the bed hastily made. I stayed in bed for most of the day, listening to the muffled sounds of my parents moving around downstairs. I could imagine it, the two of them slowly orbiting each other like aimless satellites. Snow fell, soft and wet and heavy, brushing up against the windowpane in clumps. When the monotony of turning from side to side in bed grew to be too much to bear, I stood up, pulled the curtains wide and sat in the window seat. The weather reminded me of the night I'd driven angrily home from the hospital with the windows down - when Toby had still been alive.

But had he really been alive then, silent and still in his hospital bed?

He'd fallen asleep and stayed asleep. My baby brother, lost to dreams. When had he really gone? Was it really when his heart stopped beating? More and more, it seemed to me that he'd left us long before that. And it was my fault.

I leaned against the window, cold glass against my forehead, and looked out into the yard. A fluttering caught my attention; an owl, so perfectly white as to be nearly invisible against the snow, was looking intently up into my window, folding its impressive wings closely against its body.

Some signs can't be misinterpreted.

I pattered down the stairs, ready to grab my coat and slip into boots to go outside and meet an owl, and then I paused. The kitchen was spotless, empty and grey except for a vivid burst of color on the table. In a slender glass vase stood a single, long-stemmed rose whose petals began as pale ivory and transitioned to a burst of crimson at their gently curling edges. I hardly believed that it could once have been a living thing, the stark contrast of it defying nature herself. Rubies and pearls, I thought. Rust on iron, the diamond spark deep within a crystal. Freshly spilled blood on freshly fallen snow.

I stroked one of the petals. It was velvety-soft: unquestionably a once-living thing.

"Nice rose, isn't it?" My father was speaking _sotto voce_ , Karen still sleeping upstairs. "The others all wilted after the service and in the cold outside, but this one held out for us. She brought it home to remember him by for a few more days."

I turned, facing him. "Is anything ever going to be okay again?"

He was my father. I wanted him to tell me that everything would be fine. I wanted him to reassure me that this was all the worst nightmare I'd ever had, but it was nothing more than that, that it wasn't real and that we were bigger and stronger than it in the end. I wanted him to wrap me up in his strong arms, rub his salt-and-peppered cheek against mine, and tell me that life was going to continue, and it was going to turn out okay in the end. I wanted him to tell me that good always triumphs over evil and light always drives away the darkness.

He rubbed his chin with a calloused hand, where it scratched audibly against his stubble, and looked at the ground.

"I don't know, Sarah. None of us are ever going to be the same. Sometimes I wonder what the point of any of it ever was."

Eventually, we sat beside each other on the couch and watched reruns of sitcoms with the volume turned down so low that neither of us could hear it over the sound of our own breathing. I fell asleep there, my cheek against his shoulder, and when I woke up, he was gone and the faded patchwork quilt that hung over the back of the sofa was tucked securely beneath my chin.

I'd forgotten about the owl.

He didn't let me forget for long.

The next night, there he was, perched just outside my window and staring haughtily in at me as I moved to draw the curtains. The light from my lamp reflected eerily in his eyes.

"Fine," I muttered. "But you could be more normal about it."

The truth was that he couldn't, or at least he wouldn't, and I knew it, but it gave me some satisfaction to bang things around in my bedroom as I found myself a sweater and an old hat that I pulled down snugly over my ears. I slipped the iron chain around my neck as insurance from him. One final defense.

When I stepped outside, hugging my jacket around my body, I immediately moved to be out of sight of the windows. The night was clear and cold, my breath a foggy plume before me in the dim light, stars twinkling overhead. The absence of cloud cover provided the temperature a flimsy excuse for plunging, and wind tore through the zipper of my coat.

I walked, slowly, deliberately, uphill to the line of trees on the far edge of the yard. As soon as I stepped into the thicket, blessedly sheltered a little bit from the biting wind, Jareth stepped out of shadows I hadn't noticed yet, wearing a mantle of white feathers that streamed down his back.

It reminded me of our own final meeting, years ago. A tug beneath my breastbone: the ever-present internal conflict. I needed him. I didn't want to see him, not now, not ever. I couldn't bear it if he left me now, too, to drown in undeserved kindness, to partake in grief I had no right to feel. I hated him.

"I saw you stopped by the funeral," I said in clipped words.

"It was a nice service, as far as that particular tradition goes," he returned.

We looked at each other. He held a crystal-tipped cane in one gloved hand. I slipped the hat off of my head, suddenly too warm.

"Did you coax me out here so you could just stand there and stare at me?"

"I thought we should talk, Sarah. The last time we exchanged words, I felt that the conversation went poorly."

"I don't care who you share your bed with. You and your constant intrusions into unwelcome and vulnerable moments are the problem here."

"Don't you _want_ to see me?" he asked, and his voice was quicksilver, weighty and suggestive.

"Why would I want to see you, Jareth? What could I possibly want with you? I didn't see you for eight years."

"Ah," he said, and the light caught his constricted eye. "But you were looking."

"You never came when I called. Everyone has a breaking point, Jareth. You can't expect me to wait forever for someone I wasn't even sure was real."

"You speak as though you didn't put your life on perpetual hold because of our first meeting. You never could cobble together the right words, but you were forever calling. You even called the night that I came, though I was powerless to answer."

"My brother is dead."

The words echoed within me, just as cold and as hollow as I was.

"Consider, Sarah. It was an act of mercy. He was better off not to have suffered through an overlong, incomplete life."

"Whose mercy? Yours? Who asked for that mercy? Who made _you_ the arbiter of life and death?" There. A spark of anger that began to thaw the ice.

"Toby-"

" _Don't you dare speak his name._ "

He stopped speaking at once, touching his tongue to his teeth.

"Josh went into the labyrinth to save my brother's life, and instead he took it, and you knew what was happening the whole time."

"Words have power," he said simply, as if we were discussing the weather instead of the unnatural extinguishing of my brother's life.

"I sent him to save my brother, and you twisted it around on us because you're angry that I beat your game when I was still just a child," I spat.

"He sent himself, and the wager was never for the retrieval of your brother, it was only ever for his own life. Think, Sarah. He wished himself away, and his quest was only ever to bring himself back. Anything he disturbed during his time in the labyrinth is on his own head." He was infuriatingly calm.

"Why the mythology? Why all of the theatrics? Why this strict adherence to the story? Why make a game out of it?" One of my fingernails had chipped, and I was picking at the jagged edge of it, ripping it deeper and deeper until it tore painfully into the quick.

"I have only ever tried to meet your expectations, Sarah. You can't blame me for that. You gave me the story. I have only helped you to fit it to your cast."

"You fit it to my cast by pitting Josh against my baby brother?" I asked. My voice cracked. "You fit it to my cast by setting up Toby's death to stain our hands with his blood? And you thought that was going to _meet my expectations?_ "

His face shifted, and for the first time, I saw something close to horror in his eyes. A miscalculation discovered at last.

"Are you honestly trying to make me believe that you were trying to make me happy by killing my brother?" Tears were flowing freely down my cheeks now, returned after days of dry eyes, and he seemed, for the first time, capable of recognizing that he should not touch me.

"I wanted to make you mine," he said, very quietly.

" _Fuck_ you," I sobbed, wringing the knitted material of the hat in my hands. "How could you possibly think that taking everything I loved would make me want to be with you?"

"Sarah," he said, nearly crooning my name, and I was furious at the way my body responded to his voice, rage and primal magnetism intermingling in each pulse of hot blood, something deep within me reaching for the man who had played god with our lives. "Sarah, let me fix it."

"Turn back time," I said, my fingers tangled in the fabric of the hat, hardly daring to hope.

"Such a reordering is beyond even my power," he said, obliterating that tiny ray of hope immediately, and to what little credit I was able to give him, he looked like he wished he could. "I cannot summon lives across the divide. But I have a particular talent with dreams."

I waited for him to continue.

"I also have a not inconsiderable aptitude where ritual madness is concerned. Dionysus and I have that, at least, in common. Dreams and madness are, in their own way, two sides of a coin. A divide between what is real and what is not and the discernment thereof. What are memories if not dreams, dredged up from the past and catalogued in your subconscious? What is memory itself if not a particular strain of madness?"

Horror crept up into my throat. "Jareth, _no_. You can't take this from me. You can't erase who I am because it's convenient for you. You can't erase who you've made me."

"No," he said slowly, his mouth working, "not if you won't let me. I only want to set things right." He drew the end of the cane through the snow at his feet, considering. "To remedy the situation. To salve your wounds."

I thought of the splash of color of his red-stained rose in the middle of our slate-grey kitchen. Memories are dreams; memories, rewound and replayed so many times that the tape grows worn, that the picture changes, that nostalgia tints them sepia, are madness.

"Could you take it from them?" I asked.

He looked up, eyes solemn. "Your loved ones?"

"Dad and Karen."

A small smile began to emerge across his lips, transforming him into something hatefully lovely. "My selfish Sarah."

I should have told him that I wasn't his-selfish-anything, but instead I stood my ground. "It's no worse than abandoning them and taking another child. It's no worse than pretending I didn't cause their pain."

"They won't be the same," he said, cautioning. "The manipulation of their memories will be far from trivial. I'll have to wipe nearly a quarter-century from them, and the sense of loss will persist, if vaguely. I cannot erase a child so completely, let alone two. It won't make them happy, Sarah."

"But will they be in less pain?"

"Although it isn't pain, anesthesia is far from comfortable," he said, and I wanted to tell myself that he was speaking in riddles, that he was being intentionally abstruse. But of course he wasn't, and his meaning was clear as day. As obvious as the poison spreading slowly through me.

"Sarah?"

My chin snapped up in tandem with Jareth's, my tears drying to salt on my cheeks. The voice of the unnaturally - and how unfair it was to say it in those terms, for she had never been natural - beautiful woman cut through the night, and I turned halfway to see her, swathed in scarlet robes and determination, her feet bare in the snow and her hair in loose obsidian curls. I turned halfway back to see the dark, frightening change to Jareth's face, and then I stepped aside, watching her face as she approached.

"He is wicked and cruel and he will ruin you, Sarah. He will ruin you like he ruined your would-be hero, and he will laugh over your brokenness."

I stood, impartial, and at the moment when she crested the hill to break into the trees, reaching out for my hands, and realized I was not alone, I watched her determination fade into dread, the horrible knowledge that this was the end for her, that she had finally taken her last misstep.

Still she found enough courage to try one last time. "He hates you, Sarah," she whispered, and the whisper broke fruitlessly on the stone of my heart.

His face contorted with rage, and I was ashamed to find my legs shaking with relief as his eyes left my face and he turned to her. She, for her part, held her chin high, but her lips trembled and the color had stolen away from her face, leaving her skin paper-white against the black of her hair. His fingers brushed a curl, rippling like water, behind her slightly pointed ear. She exhaled, I watched the fall of her chest, and her eyes drifted closed as if he were putting her to sleep with the trail of black leather fingertips behind her ear.

"Little Ayelet, always striving to promote herself above her given station. Do you know you were named for the gazelle? Your strength would have been in running - in evading the hunt - but your audacity brought you directly to the hunter's door and laid you down. Your people will wonder at your story for ages to come."

His fingers curled 'round her chin, and I saw the skin around them whiten with the strength of his grip. Her eyes opened, but rather than looking at him, she caught at my eyes with her gaze, desperate and angry and scared. "Sarah," she gasped, and her hands caught at his wrist. "Sarah, you understand what he's offering you and you know that you don't want it. Stay with your family, Sarah. Don't go with him."

 _I have no family. I have only the shattered remnants of something that was broken to begin with._

"You are unworthy of saying her name, and yet you croon it like a prayer," he said, and his eyes glittered too brightly.

"He's going to kill me, Sarah, just as he killed your brother, and then he will kill you, piece by piece, until you don't recognize yourself. Until you forget what must never be forgotten."

"I've been remarkably merciful to you, all things considered," he said, and they stood there like statues, impossibly beautiful and impossibly still, her hands clasped around his wrist, his fingers digging cruelly into her jaw. "Few can say they've stood in direct opposition to a king in his domain so many times without being struck down."

"I won't be able to say it again, will I?" she asked, her voice low and sorrowful.

"All this needless sacrifice for love of a king," he said, chuckling, and his quiet laughter made my stomach twist. "You've played it all remarkably straight, pet. Nevertheless, I would like to speak in my own defense: while I would never deign to suggest that I should be absolved of all blame for the tragedy that unfolded within my labyrinth, it was not I who murdered her brother, and I do not intend to harm a single hair on her body. My wish, should she choose to grant it, is for her eventual acceptance of her title and position."

Her dark eyes found my face. "He will never love you. He will never love anyone; he will never even love himself - how could he possibly love-" Her voice stuck in her throat, and for a moment I watched her ruby-painted lips form words that no one would ever hear, and then he bent and put his ear to those lips.

"Cat's got your tongue, I see," he said, and then turned his head to murmur into her ear, something that I couldn't make out.

When he drew back, her eyes burned with hatred, and then they rolled back into her head.

I stood, unable to tear my own eyes away from the scene unfolding before me. I thought for a moment that he would look back at me, but he did not. "Speak, Sarah," he said, and her fingers curled more tightly around his wrist. "You have only to say the word and I will spare her life."

I watched wordlessly.

"Very well," he said, his eyes fixed on hers, blazing whitely in her ashen face, brighter and brighter, as if he had plucked them out and replaced them with stars from the sky above us. I looked away as her mouth opened in a silent scream, blood running from the corners of her eyes, but even if I closed my eyes I could still see the terrible fire from hers burning red through my eyelids, bathing me in violent starlight.

When the light finally died with a final flash and a single, lonely cry, no trace of her remained.

He held a silver circlet in his hands, and it was exquisite, intricate silver tendrils curling over and under each other, and there were stars set into it - for that was what they were, no diamonds or moonstones for his queen, but stars of destruction, plucked first from the sky above and second from the face of a nymph unlucky in love - twinkling with desolate light. In other other hand, he held the stem of a flower black as night, open in perfect, trumpeting, seven-petaled bloom, and this he tucked into the crown, where it became the living centerpiece, twining its stem around and through the silver filaments.

"An unpleasant business."

"You would ask me to wear the epitaph of the nymph whose crime was daring to love you?"

In truth, it was the greatest crime she could have committed, to love the terrible and beautiful king. I should know. It has brought me nothing but loss, the continual sacrifice at his altar of everything I've known and everyone I've loved.

"You chose not to extend mercy. The stars were always to be your crown, my love," he said.

"Not those stars."

The silence between us was rife with unspoken meaning, but he was reluctant to be the first to break it. Even so, he finally drew a breath.

"Should I leave you? Do you need time to consider?"

"I don't need time," I said, meeting his eyes and seeing trepidation in them. It made me feel powerful. It gave me renewed purpose. "I am not afraid. I will come with you."

Though he let the tiniest breath creep out of his lungs, there was no release of tension in the lines of his body or of his face. I stepped closer, bowed my head to him, and I felt his hands brush my hair away from my face.

I thought of the brush of his fingertips through the nymph's hair just before she died at his hand.

But this was a death all my own, wasn't it?

He arranged my hair so that it cascaded over my shoulders, and then he settled the circlet on my brow and it nestled there as though it had always belonged. It hardly had any weight at all, but the weight of my ravaged life offset it, sank deeply into my heart. I steeled myself. The glow of the stars set into the diadem threw shadows across his face as I looked back up at him, looked at the sharp angles and unnatural planes of his features. I saw something uncertain in the turn of his mouth.

And it made me smile.

"I will be mistress of the labyrinth," I said to him.

He leaned forward, touched his lips to my forehead, lingered there for far too long. "I told you once that you were no match for me," he breathed against me in the silence. "I was wrong."

He gathered me to himself, and I allowed him to press my body against his, to hold me tightly there, and the next time I opened my eyes, we were in the castle beyond the goblin city and I knew I would never return Aboveground. I lifted my chin.

I know that he is wicked and cruel, and I know that he has already brought about my ruin. But I have nurtured wickedness and cruelty of my own, and my will is as strong as his, and my kingdom will be every bit as great.


	7. Peripeteia

I come from a line long enough for our story to fade, untraceable, behind us into the mists of time. We are from a time before written word, before spoken word, before history was considered valuable. We passed through the veil between dreams and waking to exist, unfettered, among the mortals who had given us life and status and power.

Dreams beget greater dreams, but the first dreams are the most potent. We were as close to gods as they could imagine, rife with magic that swirled in unknown glyphs beneath our skin and sent tiny sparks snapping between our fingertips.

So it was that when the mantle of wish-granting was thrust upon our shoulders, we despaired. Formerly endowed with nearly limitless power, we were now bound by the narrow vision of the wish-makers. The mortals. Those-who-wanted. We were relegated to granting basic needs and petty desires. The world waited, still and quiet, for us to meddle in it, to swirl our fingers and our magicks through its untapped potential, but we had become glorified hedgewitches, curing minor ailments and performing love spells, while our former power lay locked away, far beyond the limits of mortal minds.

In large part, Sarah's imagination had drawn me to her. Given a new world to stumble through, she turned the horrors to wonders, shed unsavory bits of herself and created new pieces to take their places. Had she failed - she should have failed - I would have kept her. I would have fed off of her imagination. She would have supplied me with a never-ending draught of imbuing dreams, and I would have risen to my former self.

Instead, and against all odds, shedding and molting, changing too quickly and too surely for the labyrinth to counter her, she succeeded, and in my own gambit, I lost her. Most of the boy followed as collateral, but not all of him. It was not my intention.

The labyrinth is older even than I, and she chooses who to keep and who to discard; who to wound and who to heal, who to maim and who to make whole again. The labyrinth chose to keep the boy, but not all of him stayed.

Sarah was always remarkably powerful. She spoke her power into being. Endowed with certain powers. Even so, she remained blissfully ignorant of its full extent.

One does not taste the nectar of limitless possibility and then release it into the mist. It was neither simple nor easy for me to return her to her unremarkable life, but words have power.

When I was at last free to go to her again, several years later, exploiting a loophole that was hardly a loophole at all but rather serendipity, her untapped potential sang out deafeningly, greeting me like a lover. To be in the presence of perfectly guileless belief, even after all the intervening years - she was cold, clean water to a parched man slowly succumbing to thirst. Dark-haired and green-eyed, slender and sublime.

And, above all, mine.

* * *

"You'll want to see your room," he was saying, his hand at my elbow to steady me.

I tried to gather my wits, but I was nearly struck dumb by my surroundings. The castle was clean and shockingly white - or at least palest grey - and we were standing in the center of the throne room, blissfully devoid of small, grimy goblins. I had only been here for a moment, and that had been eight years ago, but this wasn't the way I'd remembered it at all.

The throne was perched on a very high dais, draped in silks and furs. Four high, arching doorways at compass points led off into the castle; I remembered two of them. One to the gravity-defying Escher room, and one that led back to the Goblin City and then to the Labyrinth herself. I'd never had the pleasure of crossing the threshold of either of the other two. Time had been short the last time I had walked these halls.

"Come, Sarah," he said, surprisingly patient.

"Did you mean your room?" I asked.

He laughed. "You are welcome in my chambers whenever you wish, but I had thought you might prefer some time to yourself."

I nodded, and he led me through one of the remaining two archways, down a hallway and into a small alcove of rooms, where he opened the center door and ushered me through. "I will come to you later," he said, "but for now, it would be wise to rest. You are unused to crossing dimensions."

I entered the room, immaculately clean stone floors, an area rug that insulated from the cold stone, a bed heaped high with down-filled blankets and pillows, the edges turned back invitingly. I turned to examine the rest of the room: large windows with sills wide enough to sit on surrounded by heavy cream-colored curtains, tied back; an enormous wardrobe against the wall; a vanity with a mirror; a little wooden door that opened into a bathroom.

On the marble vanity that spread nearly endlessly out before the great mirror, there was a porcelain dish. Perhaps once it had been piled high with fruit, but now it held only an apple, blushing red over green, a ruby-red pomegranate, even and lustrous, and a peach as orange-red as flame. One for my original sin, one for my entrapment here in the Underground, one for my past dreams-turned-reality. I held the apple in my hand, considering it.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Beneath the crown on my brow, dark circles below my eyes spoke to my exhaustion. My face was sad but determined; there was something in the line of my own mouth that I didn't recognize, not on my own face. I leaned in further toward my reflection, and the iron chain slipped through the zipper of my jacket. I tucked it back hastily, dropping it into the collar of my shirt so that it laid against my skin: the wrongness of it was deafening, here. My coat shrugged easily off of my shoulders; my feet wriggled out of my shoes, and then I stood before the mirror in a faded purple sweater and a pair of blue jeans. I wasn't sure I'd ever felt so out of place. I certainly didn't look like a modern day Eve in the Garden.

I lifted the circlet from my head and set it on the vanity, watching the ebb and flow of the stars' light.

There was a quiet knock at the door. It was too tentative to belong to him, so I replaced the apple in the dish, crossed the room and opened the door, and a goblin immediately bustled into the room.

I'd always thought of goblins as being approximately knee-height and perpetually smudged with dirt, but she came up to my elbow and her hands were dark but clean, wrinkled with age where they smoothed the fabric in her hands.

"Brought you a gown. Guessed your measurements," she said, speaking in sentence fragments with a sweet little voice. I took the dress from her. It was olive green silk that flowed through my hands like water. I turned to the little wardrobe and opened its doors, sighing.

Several gowns, fastidiously pressed and never worn, hung in the cedar-scented wardrobe. I plucked an empty hanger from the bar and slipped the silk dress onto it. It immediately slid off of the hanger and pooled on the floor. I sighed again.

The little goblin hadn't left yet. She cleared her throat and it startled me enough to turn to face her.

"Bringing food up from the kitchens soon," she said, disapproval in her dark eyes.

I nodded. My stomach grumbled.

When she'd left, I shed my Aboveground clothes and wore a plain linen slip to climb up into bed, but not before giving myself one last look in the mirror. Green-eyed, dark-haired, wraith-like and profoundly sad. I was the Sarah I remembered: unremarkable, indelibly human. I buried myself beneath overstuffed comforters and fell asleep, feeling more like a child than I had in years.

"Sarah." He spoke me awake. I half-rose from the blankets. "You should have eaten."

"I wasn't hungry," I said, looking past him at the tray gone cold by the door. It had been a torn hunk of crusty brown bread, several thin slices of roast beef, and some sort of green vegetable. My stomach burbled in contrary protest, and his lips thinned. "So what now? Are we going to have a big wedding?"

"Humans and their endless, meaningless ceremonies," he said. "No, we are not going to have a 'big wedding.' There is no need to affirm our commitment. The Labyrinth and her inhabitants knew the moment of your arrival. You are theirs now, and they are yours."

I bit my lip in consternation and he mistook it for disappointment.

"If a party you want, a party you'll have. I'll have invitations sent. The neighboring kingdoms will be pleased. It has been a very long time since anyone has had anything to celebrate, and Dionysus was the god of wine, after all."

"I want to leave that myth behind, Jareth," I said, still tangled in bedding.

"The story doesn't end until the last word is written, Ariadne."

In one motion, I rose from the bedclothes in anger, and struck at him, raking my fingernails across his face. His head snapped to the side and then slowly turned back to me, four thin scratches streaking over his cheek. His nostrils flared, and then he visibly worked to compose himself while I grew more aware of my own labored breathing.

When I was sure that he was not about to retaliate, I spoke. "And what about our deal, Goblin King?"

"Your parents," he said, and conjured a crystal to hold before my eyes. "I thought you would ask. The moment you returned here with me, I took what I could and sutured their memories back together. It is hardly seamless, but it is done."

I peered into the depths of the crystal and saw Jareth's rose, red and white, on the table. The rest of the dining room gradually filtered into view: there was Dad, and there was Karen, sitting across from each other.

"That's quite a rose," Dad said.

"I wish I could remember where I found it," said Karen, but her voice was thinner, reedier than I remembered, and her hands shook where she clasped them around a mug. "I looked at it for too long today. I thought I was remembering something, but it was just a dream."

"What dream?" Dad asked.

"We had a little family," she said, "We had a little boy, and we took him out to the park, and he giggled while we fed the swans."

"Mmmm," Dad said, with the familiarity of someone who had spent years learning to read the writing on this particular wall.

"Sometimes I wish we'd started a family," she said, her eyes too-bright and brimming. "Sometimes I think it would have been less lonely."

"I'm not lonely," he said obstinately, but his knuckles went white where he held his own mug. "I think the two of us do just fine on our own."

"I'm not saying you're not enough," she said, a tear tracing its way down her cheek. "I just feel like I'm not quite whole, sometimes, when I see mothers with their children."

As they lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, the image faded - the crystal went dark - and my chest felt tight.

"Is it always like that for them?"

"Not always," he said, "but often."

"Is it better than it would have been?"

"That is not for me to say."

He sat on the side of the bed, and I turned away from him and sank back into the pillows. The mattress shifted behind me, and he'd followed suit.

"Go away," I said, my voice muffled among the pillows.

"I thought you might rather not be alone tonight."

"I don't want to be around _you_ ," I said peevishly.

I heard the crinkling of leather gloves being removed, and then he cradled my body against his. My traitorous body responded to the nearness of him; I drew in a slow, slow breath, and then exhaled. His fingers threaded through my hair.

Despite my internal battle, my anger and despair, I craved physical contact. Jareth was the nearest thing to human down here, and I needed _human_ contact. I'd been starved for touch for what felt like ages. Josh's touch at the funeral had been so obviously distant that I'd shrunk from it, and before then I'd had to beg for every lonely moment spent curled against his side. In sharp contrast, Jareth's touch was infinitely careful, worshipful, warm and deliberate. I shivered at the brush of skin against my skin. His fingers sought the nape of my neck, and once there, they kneaded the muscle until I nearly felt boneless.

And then he grazed the chain with his fingertips, and he hissed in pain, his body stiffening as he retracted.

"You should not have brought that here," he said.

I said nothing.

"After everything, you still fail to trust me? I have accomplished all that you asked of me. I have honored our agreement."

"If you're honestly asking me whether or not I trust the man who tricked my boyfriend into killing my brother so that he and I could have a happily-ever-after, then I don't think the question even deserves an answer."

" _Sarah_."

He was pleading with me: he was asking for my trust, asking for my understanding, perhaps even daring to ask for my forgiveness. He was asking me to remove the chain. He was asking me to let him hold me. _Fear me. Love me._

I was too warm, my heart beating too quickly. He was asking to serve me, and the responsive slickness growing between my thighs was answer enough. I would let him serve me. I would be his queen. He would be my slave. Sick excitement built in my stomach. I looked at him over my shoulder.

The king brought low. Penitent. Miserable. Hardly daring to hope.

I bit my cheek so hard that it bled. "Touch me," I said.

He brought his body close to mine so that I could feel the length of him, impossibly hard. I was panting even before he began to lift the shift away from my body, untangling it from me, freeing me from the sheets, rendering me bare. I turned onto my back and gazed at him, slender and white and noticeably erect through his breeches, his face full of some unrecognizable emotion.

"You too," I said, and watched him begin to unbutton the white poet shirt, his eyes flickering over me, from my face to my breasts to my legs. When he was bare, he reached out for me, stroking reverently along the curve of my hips, the plane of my abdomen, the underside of my breast. His eyes caught on the chain as his fingertips danced more closely to the tip of my breast. I touched my tongue to my teeth, hardly daring to breathe.

"Take it off," he said, "and I will touch you." He rolled a crystal between his bare fingertips and within it I was sure I could see flashes of myself writhing in ecstasy. He touched it to the dip in my navel and I wriggled, too hot, overstimulated, phantom hands caressing along my limbs. "Take it off," he repeated, and his fingers trailed down my abdomen, cupping me where the fire built.

I wrenched it from my neck and let it fall to the floor behind the bed. "Touch me."

The crystal evaporated into the air. He drew his fingers through the wetness between my legs and smiled.

"So wet," he sighed, "So ready. Such a perfect girl, my Sarah. My queen."

I groaned deep in my throat, refusing to touch him. His fingers circled my clit, slight pressure, and I felt as though I would already explode, even now, after only seconds of the contact I craved. The horrid wrongness of it only made my pulse beat faster: here, beneath my breast; here, in my throat; there, between my thighs.

He brushed his thumb across my nipple at regular intervals, leaned in to mouth at the junction of my neck and shoulder, murmuring, "So hot - so wet - _precious_ thing."

One of his fingers pressed up inside of me, and then a second - "so tight" he groaned against my skin - drawing a long, low noise from my throat as my hips shifted of their own volition, fucking myself on his fingers as he moved his thumb to my clit. I ground against him, making small noises of pleasure, arousal spiraling higher and higher so quickly that I thought the inevitable release might kill me.

His forearm came down, rested across my hips; I looked full into his face as he pinned me down, snarled at him as his movements stilled and a smile grew across his face. "Are you ready to come for me, Sarah mine?"

I tried to twist my hips, but he was improbably strong and impossibly frustrating.

"Come for me, precious," he insisted, and crooked his fingers inside of me, bent to press his mouth to my clit, pressed against it with his tongue, closed his lips around it, tugged and sucked at it as I keened, shrill and piercing, beyond shame, spiraling into the climax I'd fought so desperately for.

"My good girl," he said against my skin, and I sobbed with relief and then I was just sobbing - sobbing for Toby, for Karen, for Dad, even for Josh who had left me at the altar of my brother's death, to whom, in retaliation, I had not extended the gift of forgetting. The violent, toe-curling wave of my orgasm had knocked everything else loose in its wake, and Jareth gathered me into his arms, held me tightly against his body. I wept into his shoulder for a minute or two before wiping my eyes with the back of my wrist.

Now it _was_ hope in his eyes, naked and vulnerable, and I smiled at it, reached down between our bodies to curl my fingers around his shaft. He exhaled, and I felt a shiver run through his chest. "Will you have me, Goblin King?"

He laid me down on the bed, my hair plastered to my neck and shoulders, and moved over me; as he pressed the tip of his cock to my entrance, I shifted against him, and when he slid silkily in, I watched his face go slack for just a moment - "so tight" - before he regained control, moving slowly. I clenched around him and he gasped. I reached up to his shoulders, slipped my hands down to his waist and then to his hips, urging him on. His pace quickened and I pressed my fingernails into his back, raked them slowly down, stared at the lines I'd already drawn across his face.

The kohl around his eyes was smudged; I reached up and drew my fingers through it, dragging dark lines across his face, and he groaned as his hips snapped and stuttered against mine. The angle between us changed slightly, and I felt my body building toward a second orgasm, urged him faster, deeper.

"You needed this, didn't you - so ready, so wet for me - _oh_ \- my Sarah, my queen -" his voice broke into a rasping whisper and he leaned down to kiss at my mouth, nip at my earlobe, mouth down my neck as he buried himself in me and I came around him - with him.

I looked at him, where he lay with his cheek against my shoulder, and I reached out, took his chin between my fingers, turned his face to mine. He was sated, sleepy, but opened his eyes to look back at me.

"You should see yourself right now, looking thoroughly defiled," I said to him, hard edge to my voice, and smeared makeup down his cheeks with my thumbs. "So eager to be filthy."

He twitched against my thigh, dropped his face back into my shoulder.

After he had fallen asleep, I extracted myself from him and retrieved the iron chain from where it had fallen behind the bed, and then I wound it several times around my wrist before I lay back down.

Jareth reached for me as soon as I did; I slept soundly in his arms.

When I woke, the sun was high in the sky, and he was gone.

I bathed to wash the sticky sheen of sweat off of myself, and then I took the olive green dress from the wardrobe and stepped into it. It molded perfectly to my body, and I looked at myself in the mirror, surprised to find that I looked the part of Eve this morning. The color, as I was sure had been intended by whoever the seamstress was, set off the green in my eyes, and the skirts fell nearly to the ground. I slipped into a pair of heeled boots, stepped over a now-cold tray of bread-and-jam and eggs, and walked back through the castle to stand before the city.

The goblin city wasn't in the full disarray that I'd expected. It merely looked worn around the edges, lived in; it looked like a quaint, quiet little town full of citizens who mostly minded their own business. I skirted a little stone fountain and caught several pairs of eyes blinking at me from between the curtains in any given window. The labyrinth stood open before me, and I ducked into the maze to avoid the attention. Maybe they didn't mind their own business as completely as I'd thought.

It laid itself straight out before me, clean and well-lit, the floor tesselated with neat gray cobblestones, and seemed to call to me at every branch point, guiding me along on my way.

I caught sight of the little dwarf around a corner where the outer labyrinth's stone walls met the verdant hedges of the inner labyrinth. "Hoggle!" I cried, expecting his grumpy expression to smooth out into pleasant surprise - a welcome-home of sorts. Instead, his shoulders stiffened, and he tossed one quick, frightened look over one of them.

Then he darted clumsily away, but I broke into a run, skirts billowing behind me, and when I turned the corner, it was him, clear as day, fifty paces away. I could have closed the distance easily, but instead I stopped and drew myself up to my full height. "Hoggle, your Queen commands you to stop."

He stopped cold there in the shadow cast by the wall, his shoulders hunched up to his neck, and then he turned. I was surprised by his coldness; his expression was glum and dour. When I grew close enough for him to speak clearly without raising his voice, he said, "Well, well, someone's hoity-toity. Big for your britches, ain't you? Callin' yourself queen already, like you've been here more than a day or two. Like you forgot what happened not two weeks past."

"Of course I haven't forgotten, but I can't change what happened," I said, stung. "I hoped you'd be happier to see me."

His eyes met mine, and they were hard as steel. "'Course I missed you, Sarah. 'Course I wanted to see you. But I didn't want to see you here. Not like this."

"Jareth says I'm meant to be here."

"Yeah," Hoggle snorted. "Jareth says a lot of things."

"He doesn't lie," I said.

"Said that too, I 'spect."

I bit the inside of my lip. "Where's Ludo, Hoggle? Is he around here somewhere? What about Sir Didymus?"

"Haven't seen 'em in years," he said, gruffly. "Ludo probably got assigned to the quarries on account of his talent with rocks. Y'don't show off 'round here 'less you want to be noticed, 'n' bein' noticed is never good. Far as I know, Didymus is still guardin' the Bog, but why it needs a guard's anyone's guess."

"And what are you doing?" I asked.

He raised an arm to scratch at a tuft of white hair. "Same as always. Tryin' to stay outta the way."

"When I met you, you were herding fairies," I said.

"Lotta that, these days. They're overrunnin' the gates. Jareth's soft on 'em, but I couldn't tell you why. Looks like nothing any of us did back then mattered much."

"Don't say that," I said.

He snapped his mouth shut, scowling.

 _Sarah._

The labyrinth sighed my name, sending a breeze eddying across my skin.

 _Sarah_.

Hoggle looked up from where he had been studied the holes in the toes of his boots. "Don't listen to it," he said.

But the labyrinth continued calling, and I tilted my head, straining, cupping my hand behind my ear.

"Don't!" Hoggle barked, and I cuffed him on the back of the head to startle him into silence.

And there it was: _Sarah!_ A child's voice, sad and sweet, beneath the siren call of the labyrinth.

"Where is he, Hoggle?"

The dwarf rubbed at his head where I'd hit him. "Thought we were friends."

"Where _is_ he?"

"It's not where he is, little lady," Hoggle said, and the diminutive rankled at me. "It's where he was."

"Take me there."

"It's not gonna help," he grumbled. "An' why I should help you, I sure don't know."

"Because I am your queen," I said, "and I demand it."

He sank into a derisive bow. "If my lady commands it," and then, under his breath, "don't say I never tried to spare you." He took off at an unexpectedly quick clip, and I stumbled briefly over some detritus in the path as I hurried to follow.

"Not lookin' after you as well as it should," Hoggle said. My eyes dropped to the ground, but nothing was there. No curling root underfoot, no dry twig, no loose pebble. Just the perfect, squared-off pattern of the stones beneath my feet, grey-white and cool where the sun couldn't reach them.

As Hoggle led me back toward the castle, the ground began to slope. "Hate it down here," I heard him grumble, "Smells awful, feels worse." The light was beginning to fade behind us even though as far as I was aware, it was still practically high noon. I looked back at the sky and it was grey and overcast. "Looks like it's not pleased," Hoggle said, his fists on his hips. "Doesn't want you down here, I expect."

I tossed my hair over my shoulder. "I am its mistress now," I said, standing tall and proud. "I don't care what it wants."

"Unwise, that," he said, and forged on. Where the path had once been straight and welcoming, there were labyrinthine twists and turns that Hoggle navigated with confidence, and I followed in his wake, every now and then resting my palm against the stone walls that hemmed us in. Sometimes I was sure I could feel a faint pulse in the maze.

When the incline of the ground turned to stone steps that led underground, I felt my spirit begin to quail within me. The breath that wafted up and out of the ground was ancient and slightly sour. I paused at the stop of the stairs, twisting my skirts in my hands.

"Thought you wanted to see him," Hoggle said.

"I did, too."

"No skin off my back if you wanna turn back now. Wouldn't mind staying outta the dungeons. Not many places are _nice_ , here, but 'specially not these."

 _Sarah! Are you there?_

My ears strained to pull his voice from the fray. It felt transparent, remembered, not quite there - watercolors blossoming, bleeding across white paper - but it was him. I couldn't leave without seeing whatever Hoggle could show me. Enough of him remained here to be able to recognize and call to me, even with the labyrinth swirling around him, whispers and shadows and memories.

"I want to see him."

"Kinda think you got the wrong idea 'bout what you'll see," he said, and moved further into the gloom. Darkness seemed to tug at his edges, swarming around his silhouette. "Come on, then."

"Josh came this way?" I asked, and heard wind whistle low through a keyhole somewhere down below.

"He did."

"Did you see him?"

"Fat lot of good it did him, runnin' into me down here. There are rules, y'know. About what we can or can't say. Too much I couldn't say."

I stared at my feet, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness as I followed the sound of Hoggle's footsteps. It took an eternity, but eventually I was able to make out shapes: doors standing ajar, full black where doorways led into dark rooms. If I squinted, I could just make out dark footprints stained into the stone slabs underfoot, smudges of individual toes pointing in the direction opposite us.

Just for a moment I could see Josh, blond hair matted with blood, wrist hanging at an awkward angle, limping heavily toward freedom with a bundle of straw and stone in his hands, trying desperately to believe that he'd saved the day. A sharp needle of pain shot through my left side, and I pressed my hand to it; all I felt was the smooth, dry fabric of my dress. The walls seemed to be closing in on me. I wasn't sure there was enough air down here to continue on.

Hoggle's face loomed in front of me. "Snap out of it," he said. "It's messin' with you. Jareth'll have my hide if something happens down here. Bad enough I brought you here without this kinda bad mojo comin' down on our heads. Breathe and keep your head clear."

"Are we close?"

Instead of answering, he pressed something into my hand. I held it in front of my face to examine it, and found the handkerchief that I'd kept the crystal tied in. It was wrinkled and stiff, but unmistakably mine.

Several more steps found us standing together at the edge of one last set of stairs, resourceful Sarah and her intrepid, odd little guide. He nodded at me and I descended into the room below the castle, my eyes wide. With each step, the room seemed to lighten a little bit more, until it was bathed in sourceless grey light.

 _Is that you? Have you come?_ He sounded hopeful, his little voice hoarse and catching, faint on the stale breeze curling through the room.

The ceiling was strewn with tiny pinpoints of light, an eerie facsimile of the night sky, and the floor was obsidian, shot through with splintery cracks that all seemed to radiate from the center of the room. I stepped forward, noting the pillars that rose around me. Dark splotches stretched along the floor, crusted and flaking.

 _Sarah,_ he called, mournful. _Sarah, don't you love me?_

At the far side of the room, a bassinet, dusty and overturned. My step quickened, the click of my boots echoing hollowly off the walls. I reached it, turned it over, stared at its empty interior. "Toby," I murmured, righting the cradle. I straightened the blanket, and as I did, I saw Josh's face, eyes empty and shell-shocked, saw his hand reaching for me. Pulling back as if I'd been burned, I drew a slow breath.

When I turned, I could see the stairs leading up and out of the room, going on forever. I walked through the columns, trailing my fingers along them. "Toby?"

I kicked at another piece of stained cloth - formerly wrapped around the blade of that crude, cruel knife - and when I brought my eyes up again, they caught on the knife itself. I knelt in front of it, but didn't quite dare to touch it.

 _It hurts, Sarah,_ he sobbed.

"Toby, you can't stay here."

 _I can't remember anything else._

"You have to go."

 _But you'll visit me if I stay?_

"You can't stay. You have to go."

 _Don't you love me, Sarah?_

"More than anything," I whispered. "You were the most important thing in my life, and now you're gone, and I'm lost, too."

 _What happened to me?_

"I did some bad things. I didn't mean it, Toby."

 _It's so dark here, and it hurts, and I'm lonely,_ he cried, _please don't go. Sarah, please. Don't you love me?_

I touched the knife, blade stained dark, with a fingertip. Agony blossomed down my spine between my shoulderblades.

 _I love you; don't you love me? Why don't you love me anymore, Sarah?_

I wrenched myself away, leaving the knife and stumbling to my feet, running across the room to the stairs where Hoggle was waiting for me.

 _Don't leave me here alone again, Sarah. Don't ever leave me. Don't ever leave._

I scrambled up the stairs, his sweet little voice echoing behind me, morphing into something sinister. I caught my toe on the edge of a stair and pitching forward to catch myself with both hands. Hoggle looked down at me from the topmost stair.

"Seen enough?"

"Can you hear him?" I asked.

"Toby?"

I nodded.

"Can't hear nothin' the labyrinth doesn't mean for me."

"It's not him?"

"Oh, it's him, but it's also _her_ ," he said with obvious distaste. "It's the impression he left down here, wanderin' and losin' himself to her. It's not the Toby you knew Above. These tunnels change people worse'n the outside maze. You can feel it. It's different down here. Colder. Meaner."

"Is he trapped here?"

"Might be, might not be. Won't know for sure 'til he's gone."

We walked out together until sunlight fell warmly on my brow, and then he turned off into the maze and disappeared without a goodbye. The labyrinth lay neatly before me, shepherding me back to the castle, sighing and sending a warm breeze to dry the sweat at my temples. I paused at a junction, turned from the castle and sat at the edge of a wishing well, fountain bubbling up merrily at its center.

Oddly-shaped coins littered the bottom of the pool: a hexagon, a triangle, an octagon with a large hole bored through the middle. There was a penny, so obviously of my former world that it made me ache to look at it and wonder what the circumstances of its owner had been. A desperate runner of the maze? Was there another way for humans to be brought Underground? What had she wished for? Success? Peace? Happiness?

To reclaim her loved ones?

I took my earrings out, a pair of diamond studs, one in each hand. The first I dropped in and whispered, "I wish for peace for Toby," watching it fall through the water. "I wish for ruthlessness," I said, and let the other roll from the palm of my hand and break the surface of the pool with a plunk. "I wish for power and grace."

A pair of eyes blinked at me from below the surface, and when I looked again, I couldn't see where my earrings had fallen. I peered into the water, looking for a face, or a tail, or a fin. Eventually, unable to determine whose eyes had blinked at me, I returned to the castle, stepped out of the dress, bathed, and sat before the mirror, wrapped in a robe, to comb out my hair.

A quiet knock at the door heralded the coming of the stern little goblin, who bustled in to take the dress I'd worn in the tunnels below the castle, clucking at the rust-colored stains in the skirt, and leave me with another, a knee-length A-line in wine red. "Eat," she urged, watching me hang the new dress in the wardrobe. "Eat. Bring food up soon. Eat."

She hadn't lied; another knock at the door only a moment after she'd taken her leave was another tiny goblin balancing a tray on his shoulder. "Queen," he said, attempting to sink into a bow, and I hurried to take the tray from him before it spilled down his back. "Dinner!"

I closed the door behind him before slipping the food onto the vanity. A clay bowl brimmed with golden broth, and beside it sat a hunk of still-steaming brown bread, saturated with butter. My stomach constricted hungrily, and I picked up a spoon to sip at the broth.

It was gentle, velvet-smooth, hints of garlic and lemon and rosemary beneath a rich chicken stock base. I drank greedily from the bowl, holding it in both hands; I dipped the bread into it and chewed and swallowed too quickly, coughing. The warmth of the broth chased away some of the horrors that I now knew lurked beneath the castle. It was no wonder the goblins feared the dungeons. The labyrinth reigned in the darkness beneath the castle, brandishing insanity and doubt, identifying inner demons and secret fears and playing them: a virtuoso in psychological warfare.

I pushed thoughts of the dungeons away and chanced a glance into the mirror at myself. The first meal I'd eaten in days was returning some of the color to my face.

I let myself into Jareth's chambers that night, climbing the spiraling stairs in the darkness.

They were simpler than I'd expected. A stone fireplace lay, cold, at the end of the room opposite the door. His bed was huge and canopied, draped with silk; a desk and a chair sat against the wall opposite. Another, smaller door presumably led to a bathroom. He sat at the desk, poring over a scroll, quill in hand, and when I entered, he looked up.

He was distracted, that much was clear, but in the candlelight he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen, and my body ached for him. I opened my robes, releasing them from where I'd gathered them in one fist, and his eyes swept across my exposed skin, hunger building.

"I saw where Toby died," I said. "Hoggle showed me."

He paused, uncertain.

"I heard him. He was alone and confused. He was in pain."

His eyes glittered. "I'm certain it was not easy for him, but what you heard was not your brother."

"It was his voice. He was afraid."

"Places like those remember their prey."

 _Prey._

"There," I said, pointing at the bed.

He crossed the room in several long strides, then watched me carefully, one palm on the mattress..

"This is what he died for, isn't it, Jareth? So that we could be together forever?"

He didn't say anything at all. Something in his eyes reminded me of a cornered animal.

"Well?"

"Will you take it off?" he asked, clearly talking about the chain that glittered in the flickering from the candles.

"I will," I said, "but not yet."

He slowly removed his clothes, his white body slender, narrow-hipped, somehow vulnerable though I knew his power. In response, I stepped fully out of the silk robes.

"Lie down," I said, and he obeyed. My arousal grew, scorching my insides. I climbed on top of the bed, and then I climbed on top of him, straddling the plane of his pale stomach. His cock twitched behind me as his eyes glittered in the near-darkness. I watched him raise a hand and flicker his fingers, and then crystals littered the ceiling, casting low light over us where we were intertwined.

I leaned low over his body, pressing a kiss to his lips. He jerked away from me as the chain pooled across his chest, but he couldn't quite escape it without knocking me away.

"Please?" he asked against my lips, his breath coming fast.

"No," I said, and swept my tongue across his teeth. Then I relented, gathered the chain into my fist at my throat, leaned to kiss him again and this time he responded, pulling me closer with his hand behind my head.

I rose to my knees, and he reached down to grasp himself, position himself against my opening, dragging himself through the wetness there. I pushed back against him, taking him to the hilt, savoring the stretch and the fullness as my body adjusted to him. He ran a thumb over my clit. My hips jerked; I clenched around him but didn't shift.

His hands moved to my hips, urging me to move.

"No," I said.

He slid me forward, along his body.

I anchored myself into the mattress. "No."

He reached to cup my breasts, palming their rosy tips, sending twin jolts down my spine. I sighed my pleasure.

"Please, Sarah. Please, I _need-_ "

"Give me your hands."

His hands fell from my breasts, and I pulled the chain from my neck, snagging it briefly in my hair. I took it and wrapped it around his wrists, threading it through and around to bind them as he hissed in pain.

"Sarah," he pleaded, and I felt a rush of heat that anchored itself where he filled me. I drew the chain tighter, watching his skin go whiter still, and his mouth turned down. "Sarah," he said again, flexing against the chain. I watched the musculature shift along his white arms. I wanted to hear him beg from where I sat astride him.

"Do you want me to take it off?"

"Yes," he said, his voice thin.

"I won't."

His expression hardened. There was the king that I remembered: vengeful and proud even while powerless and likely humiliated.

Drawing a slow breath, I rolled my hips and watched his eyes roll back. His wrists jerked in my hands, but I held them fast. I pushed them back, above his head, and he fought me, briefly, pulling and twisting like a wild stallion, fighting for freedom as the chain burned into his skin. I twisted my hands to yank it tighter still, and then I violently shifted my hips. He bucked into me in response.

"I will take it off, or I will move."

He hissed again through his teeth, bared and feral and beautiful, and writhed beneath me.

"Do you want me to move?"

"Yes," he hissed, "Yes."

"Then stop fighting me."

His arms went slack, though I could see the tension in his jawline, a muscle jumping here, the pain written plainly there. I rose and fell above him, dragging myself inexorably toward the fall.

" _Please_ , Sarah," he groaned, rocking into me.

"Please what?" I returned, tugging cruelly at his wrists, burying my other hand in his hair to hold his head back against the pillows, exposing his throat.

"Please!"

"Tell me, Jareth," I said, moving just slowly enough to keep him on the edge, agonizingly close to the release he was willing to endure even the bite of the iron for. "Who do you love?"

"You," he rasped.

"Who's the only person your sick, twisted little heart could ever love?"

"It's you, it's you, it's you," he whispered, his voice hitching, and I let go of his wrists, and he shed the chain above his head, his skin already blistering and peeling, and he brought his hand to rub insistently at my clit until I bore down on him and came harder than I'd ever come before, riding him through it, throwing my head back and seeing stars instead of crystals above us.

When I opened my eyes, he laid beside me, stroking my hair, along my neck and my shoulders, and looking at me with something that approached tenderness. I concentrated on breathing evenly as his touch lulled me closer and closer to sleep. His fingers caught in my hair, and, lifting my head, I took his hand in mine and looked at the raw skin circling his wrist, already starting to discolor darkly, wisps of purple and black radiating outward from the chain's brand.

"I'll survive," he said.

I laid my head back down.

"It's you," he said. "You know it's you."

I closed my eyes.

I dreamt of Toby: the Toby that should have been, with light in his eyes and scars on his knees from climbing trees and playing basketball on asphalt, with sunkissed skin, freckles across his pudgy cheeks, sun-bleached hair, blonder than ever, sturdy little body.

He threw his arms around my legs until I bent to hug him properly.

"Don't worry, Sarah," he said in my ear, kissing my cheek. "It's okay."

"It's not," I said, sitting down and drawing him into my lap. "It's my fault, and it's not okay."

He struggled to get away, laughing, and I tickled him, digging my fingers into his ribs until he howled with infectious, hearty laughter, until I had to laugh too. He took advantage of my distraction and scrambled to his feet, all ungainly limbs and bruised elbows.

"I still love you, ya know," he said, grinning. Two of his lower teeth were missing, giving him a charming patchwork smile.

"Toby, I'm sorry," I said, and he kicked at the ground with a sneaker that had seen better days.

"I forgive you," he said, matter-of-factly, "but I gotta go. 'Member what Mom says? Be good."

"I can't," I whispered as he turned away and dissolved into the sunlight.

I woke to the darkness of Jareth's room, nestled into the curve of his body. His breathing was even and deep, his legs tangled through mine. I touched his arm where it draped over my waist: there was the patch of skin I'd marked with iron, and there were his fingers, long and warm and closing around mine.

"I can't be good," I whispered to the room, feeling him stir behind me without waking. "But I will be great."


	8. Exodos

We continued in this way for the next few days.

Time quickly grew meaningless in the labyrinth, whose denizens are unused to its ravages, unfamiliar with its merciless flaying of humanity. The goblins, whose lifetimes are indeed finite, have few worries within their city surrounded by the great maze. They are mostly ignorant to their own mortality.

Each day I tested the limits of the labyrinth: to find a turn that hid itself from me, a doorway lurking in a shadowed nook, a spot where the brambles grew almost too close together - any anomaly in its perfectly manicured puzzle. The further I ventured from the castle, the less I heard from the remnant of Toby that wailed in the dungeons beneath its spires.

Instead, I walked through sun-dappled gardens, verdant hedge mazes, past fountains and fragrant orchards. I trailed my fingertips through crystal-clear streams and walked across forest floors littered with leaves, climbed to the top of the tallest tower in the castle and looked out over the sun-dappled maze, all green and gold. It looked serene from such a vantage point while the wind tore at my hair.

And each night, I looped the chain around my neck, wrapped myself in a robe, and ascended the steps to Jareth's chambers. Each night he arched against me, accepting pain for the pleasures of the flesh without complaint, allowing me to bind his wrists and take what I needed. His gloves masked the evidence, and if he winced now and then as he accidentally brushed the blackened scar tissue against something, no one ever dared to ask why.

Occasionally and unprompted, he tells me that he loves me, which presumes that he is capable of love.

I love him the way that he loves me. We two are mirrors, empty reflections, and it means that we will never have enough of each other for we will never give enough of ourselves. We stretch for substance in each other, and we find only infinite emptiness. We are the recursion.

* * *

I tell her that I love her, and she tells me that I don't know what love is.

She tells me that she stays because I make her feel something - preferable to feeling nothing - but I can see the truth behind her eyes. When they open to me - a rare occurrence - I see the rawness of her pain laid bare, and I know that I am cause and perpetuator.

She feels because every moment she is with me, her wounds reopen.

* * *

As far as I could tell, it had been three weeks since my unceremonious and unheralded arrival here.

A white silk robe fell, rippling, to the floor. I was bare beneath it, save for the chain.

There it was: the familiar turn to his mouth as his eyes lit upon me; the knowledge that as much as he hated it, he needed it like the very air we breathed, needed it too desperately to dare to challenge me. I knelt above him, held the chain in my fingers, smoothed my fingers along its edges, drew it across and through his obedient, offered wrists, white and white and blackened, burned, bruised. This was his penance; this was my power.

The familiar surge of sick excitement in my stomach; the pulse in his throat, beating faster and faster. I leaned in, licked at it, tasted the salt of his sweat. The wisps of blond hair at his temples were damp. I pushed his hands over his head, urged him back and down and he didn't fight me, never fought me anymore, not since the beginning and even then his resistance was token, borne out of pride. His wrists touched the oaken headboard.

I was empty, hungry: my entire body became void and voracity. He offered his submission. I reached down, took hold of him, heard him hiss through sharp teeth. His bottom lip was still bruised where he had bitten through it the last time we danced these steps together. I stroked along the velvet length of him, hot and hard. The fingers of my other hand curled tightly around the chain, cinching it tightly against his skin.

He was perfectly still except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, eyes half-lidded but still watching me intently, fixed unerringly on my face. He twitched in my hand. I wet my lips and moved forward over him, maneuvered the tip of him to nudge against my core, and then I lifted my body away from him, ran my thumb over the slick head of his cock and listened for his sigh of frustration. Arousal flooded hot between my legs. The chain rattled against the headboard, and where my knees and thighs pressed into his sides, I could feel how tightly he was strung. He was practically trembling.

"Do you want it?" I asked him, and my voice was tight. I had a tenuous grip on my own control.

His chin dipped once.

"Show me you want it, Jareth. You can do better than that."

Patches of color bloomed high in his cheeks. He lifted his hips, seeking contact.

"Your queen is unconvinced," I said, the curtain of my dark hair falling against his white chest, and then I kissed him, hard, and he met me at every turn, his teeth nipping at my lower lip, his tongue licking at the inside of my mouth. I settled against him, positioning his cock against my slit, and swallowed the low whimper he couldn't bite back at the contact.

I sank onto him, slowly, exhaling at the sensation of fullness, free hand plastered against his chest. His heart, which I might otherwise have insisted didn't exist, was beating frantically against my palm. I smiled and shifted my hips, and his chin lifted slightly away, teeth playing over his bruised lip in response. I slid forward, and then slickly back, enveloping him, daring him to vocalize. The only response I managed to elicit was the slight shift of his hips to meet mine when I rocked back against him. My hand slid up to his throat and rested there for a moment, a threat and a promise. His eyes never left mine.

I ground down against him, my free hand now curled around the top of the headboard. His skin glistened, as did mine, and I brought myself higher and higher until I was mindless with need, my entire existence contracting to the throb and drag, his muscles shifting between my thighs, the length of him meeting the depth of me. I turned my face back down to his and saw fire in his eyes, and something that might have been hope and might have been hatred, and he brought his iron-bound wrists away from where I had held them, batted my grasping fingers away, stroked at my neck tenderly as I rose and fell above him, wet and wild and frenzied.

My hands fell to his shoulders and I bent closer to his body as his fingers splayed at my throat and then traced downward, cupped reverently at my breast - my hips skittered as his thumb swept over my nipple, losing half-a-beat to the shock of pleasure - over the plane of my stomach, tracing the beginnings of tension there as my body exulted, and finally, loosening the chain between his hands just enough to spread them to hold my hips, one iron-braceleted wrist at each side, and guide my rhythm, bucking to meet me as the pressure built.

"Good girl," he groaned, and the words pushed me over the edge, my orgasm rippling through me from core to extremities, blurring my vision, stealing my breath, my body clenching around him until he followed with a harsh exhalation of breath, pulsing within me. I hated him for praising me, hated myself for responding to it, hated that I'd been diminished so that he had risen to meet me. I slid from my perch atop him and lay on my side beside him. He left the chain around his wrists, though the pain of it must have been exquisite, and caressed along my side as I came down from the high, my chest heaving. He curled his body around mine, his back to my chest, ran long fingers through my sweat-tangled hair.

A stinging, building pain across my abdomen made me hiss in pain. I looked down to a thin, raw weal across the front of my hips, and my mouth fell open.

I jerked away from him, turned to face him. "What did you do to me?"

His eyes opened lazily. "I believe I followed you to paradise."

"Jareth, what is this?" I indicated the red line that connected my hipbones.

His eyebrows rose in genuine astonishment, and then he laughed, and it was not a nice sound. "The labyrinth is claiming her own."

"What did you do?"

"Why, Sarah, it wasn't me," he said, coyly, slipping the chain off of his wrists to let it fall into the folds of the sheets. "Of the two of us, I haven't been the one who is insistent on incorporating iron into our little sessions." I was certain, now, that I wasn't imagining a savage satisfaction on his aquiline features. I caught my breath and reached for the chain.

It was warm to the touch, retaining the heat that it had stolen from our bodies. I looped it through my fingers.

"I don't feel anything," I said.

"Perhaps not yet, but if you hold it much longer, I assure you that you will," he said. I stared at the livid, blackened rings of flesh around his slender wrists.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"Terribly," he said, and though his tone was flippant, I believed him. And at that moment, almost as if it was responding to his claim, the chain blazed red-hot and searing against my fingers; I dropped it immediately and watched a rash rise on my skin.

"If you persist with it, we will both sustain the effects," he said, a smile hiding beneath his eyes. "You are in transition. Soon, the pain will be nearly unbearable. That is the barest taste of what awaits you."

"What's happening to me?"

"I think you know," he said, and the smile emerged, wolfish. "You might wear gloves until you heal. Iron poisoning will make people ask questions that I suspect we will both find ourselves reluctant to answer."

It wasn't until I found myself standing before the mirror in his lavish bathroom, leaning forward on my palms to meet the wild-eyed gaze of the woman in the mirror, that I considered that I didn't know who would possibly ask.

* * *

How to describe her.

She is living flame, and I the moth, and how foolish it was to have supposed otherwise. I burn myself to ashes simply to touch her, and if she put up bars, I would beat my body against them, break it to pieces to taste her poison.

The iron will not kill me. The healers have seen to it, with salves and herbs and potions to halt its spread, but iron is death to my kind. The burns are hardly superficial. I will carry the scars long after she allows me to heal. _If_ she allows me to heal, for I have kept her from healing, and my queen is as vicious and vengeful as she is lovely.

The pain has become my constant companion, a dull roar beneath the everyday goings-on. Writing missives, edicts, decrees. Settling petty disputes within my borders. Securing the boundaries of the kingdom that I call my own. All these tasks, constantly underscored by the light draw on my power to keep the iron at bay, the tender, branded flesh around my wrists.

Sarah was ever a clever girl. Much too clever for her own good: to attract my attention, to best me at my own game, to leave in a whirlwind equal to the one with which I'd entered. To deny me my request after I'd granted each of hers in turn, spoken and unspoken.

Now she has come into her own, and she has moved beyond my control. I need her with an intensity that unsettles me, and she knows it, which frightens me all the more. She has become a feral creature, straddling first worlds and now natures.

But it was foolish of either of us to expect that she could give up her life Aboveground - make a deal with the devil, they used to call it - and remain in the Underground unchanged. In truth, she'd changed irrevocably at the moment her brother breathed his last. Two parts horrid understanding and swift regret; one part loss of herself. She is finally shedding the last rotting remnants.

The fragments of humanity stolen by the labyrinth to breathe life into the monster did not belong only to her brother.

One rarely emerges from the labyrinth unscathed.

* * *

I stared at my reflection, the white marble vanity cold beneath my hands, until Jareth padded over to stand behind me, tilting his head and still smiling that vulpine smile. I met his eyes in the mirror, each of us naked and exposed, and then I looked back to myself, and there was no denying what had happened to me.

How could this have happened before my eyes, I having so completely failed to see it? How could I have risen from bed every morning, stretched and dressed before the mirror in my chambers, and failed to see the stark changes wrought in me?

Looking at myself was rather like being doused with ice water. I didn't recognize the woman in the mirror, but she moved as I moved, each of us trying to shake the other off. Jareth's mirror-twin stroked a finger from her shoulder down her arm, and goosebumps rose in its warm wake on my skin.

My skin was nearly as white as the milk that the goblins brought to me each morning. My body had grown willowy, slender and graceful, tapered impossibly at my waist; my eyes were vividly green - the color of the jade beads on a bracelet my mother had once given me as a birthday gift - and ringed with long eyelashes like bold inkstrokes. My cheekbones cut more cruelly across my face. I was every bit as beautiful as the nymph who had died at my silence and his hand.

Jareth laughed. I bristled.

Leaning closer into the mirror, I discovered that every scar I'd ever had was gone. The history of every miscalculated popped pimple had vanished from my face. Each time I'd cut myself while chopping onions or sawing through a slightly stale loaf of bread, gone. The scar from the time I'd hit the front brakes instead of the back on my bike and flipped over the handlebars to break my arm, gone. My skin was radiant and unblemished except for the thin red imprint of the chain from hip to hip and the nasty-looking burn that sloughed away skin around and between the fingers of my right hand.

A lock of glossy hair the color of coffee - shinier than I remembered it - slipped past my shoulder, and Jareth brushed it back behind my ear, pulling my hair aside very deliberately, meeting my gaze in the mirror with a quirked eyebrow as his finger traced the slight point at the tip of my ear.

"I'm not human," I said, as my throat constricted. I was stricken, confronted with the shedding of the last of my former life. Even had I wanted to go back, I would never belong. I'd only half-fit in since my first return. I would never survive a second.

"No, you aren't." He looked exceptionally self-satisfied. "You have always been meant to be something more than human."

"Will I live forever?"

"No one lives forever, Sarah," he said, and placed a kiss at the junction of my neck and shoulder. I shivered.

"Who would ask questions?" I asked as he lifted my hand to his lips, kissed along the broken skin there. "Why should I need to wear gloves?"

"Have you forgotten so soon?" He looked up from my fingers, almost disappointed. "You wanted a _wedding_ -" he nipped at a fingertip, and I yelped and tried to yank my hand from his grip, "so there is to be a great celebration. Attendance should be… varied. There are many who are curious about the nature of the new queen."

I extracted my hand from his and drew myself up to my full height, which seemed higher than it had before. "What does a queen wear to such a celebration?"

"I should have thought that would have been obvious." His smile seemed to take up his entire face, all sharp teeth and darkly smudged makeup. "She wears white."

* * *

On the night of the celebration in question, I rose from a lavender-scented bath and combed out my hair until it flowed down my shoulders like water, and then I braided and swept it into a chignon at the nape of my neck.

When I threw the doors of the wardrobe wide, there was the dress I'd been expecting. I unhooked it from the hanger and stepped into it. Buttons ran the length of the back of it, and I did up as many as I could before my tired arms gave up the ghost, leaving the elusive stretch between the small of my back and my shoulderblades undone.

Ivory charmeuse that clung to my body as fluidly as a second skin, hugging my newly and artificially perfect figure. The sleeves fell past my wrists in trumpeting flares, while the neckline hung close to my collarbone, lovely and virginal. I could imagine him laughing about it as he spun it from a dream-crystal. Seed pearls traced the hem, the collar, the wrists, catching the light with nacre iridescence.

This time, the knock at the door was unmistakably his.

"Let yourself in," I said, staring at my reflection. I hadn't grown tired of visually interrogating the woman in the mirror, transfixed by marmoreal beauty and unruly eyes - by a sylph in technicolor, forever unexpected.

He entered, resplendent in black, a waterfall of white ruffles at his throat, and a golden circlet I'd never seen before on his brow. He looked me over with obvious approval, as I turned, offering him my back. A moment later I felt his fingers deftly slipping the formerly defiant buttons through buttonholes, lingering just a moment too long to smooth the fabric against my skin.

When I faced him again, he offered a pair of white, wrist-length kid gloves to me. "To disguise your disfigurement."

I smiled serenely at him, accepting his gift - such as it was - and slipped first my good hand and then my injured hand into the gloves before laying one on his arm.

"Not quite yet," he said, sweeping my star-studded diadem from the vanity where it had been neglected since my arrival. He slipped it over my head with care. "There shall be no doubt who you are. Wear it proudly."

"I am not ashamed," I told him, head held high beneath the weight of the crown, and let him lead me out of the room, where the door shut quietly behind us, down hallways and stairs until we crossed through the room that his throne overlooked, cold and empty. The final hallway - the one threshold I had not yet crossed, waiting for a signal that had never come - led down more stairs until we arrived at a huge pair of double doors, wood gleaming in the low lamplight.

And from inside those doors I could hear the sound of quiet music, of glasses clinking, conversations punctuated by laughter. I imagined the crowd, and then I imagined their eyes, curious and perhaps reverent in faces upturned to greet me. Jareth stole a glance at me and I caught him at it, offered a sideways smile.

He gestured, pushing outward with his palm extended, and the doors slid noiselessly open. As they did, the volume first grew to a roar, then quieted to near-silence, countless pairs of curious eyes blinking up at us where we stood above the room. Despite myself, I was caught off-guard by the huge ballroom, the candlelit chandeliers, the light catching on every jeweled gown, every wineglass, the clinquant ornaments strewn across the space.

The lights were low, and the starlight from my crown cast soft light and sharp edges across Jareth's face as he turned from me to the company gathered below. "Might I introduce," he said, his voice resonant in the expectant quiet, "Sarah."

A wave of murmurs crested and broke over us as the partygoers looked at each other. I leaned into him. "I see I'm a familiar name in these parts."

"And across the land," he said, inclining his head with a mischievous little smile.

We descended the staircase to greet the attendees who had gathered in my honor, and I had my hand - the uninjured one, thankfully - grasped and wrung countless times. Jareth, for his part, did try to keep me abreast of the people gathered here. Nymphs and sylphs, dwarves and elves, and more fae than I had somehow expected. Slender, cat-eyed men with stripes dyed across their faces pressed their lips to my gloves as Jareth looked haughtily down on them. Pupilless, black-eyed women with skin the color of brand new leaves knelt before us. A fae pair in golden crowns, one wrapped in a cloak like the night sky and the other in a gown like a rainy morning approached us, and Jareth inclined his head.

Without exchanging words, they returned his greeting and practically floated away. I looked to Jareth.

"Neighboring kingdom," he said. "They've been tasked with the elves, and a formidable task it is. Elves are far more intelligent than goblins, and as a result are much less agreeable subjects. The living quarters are lovely, though; that's the tradeoff for skilled workers."

I didn't quite know what to say in response. I hadn't considered that there would be establishments similar to Jareth's labyrinth here, but faced with the evidence, it seemed obvious that it would be so. A goblin passed by with a tray of champagne flutes and offered them to us, saving me from having to find some suitable reply. Jareth smiled at the little creature and handed me a glass, reserving one for himself. The goblin grinned back, baring a mouthful of pointed teeth, and swept away, but not before I noticed that even his fingernails had been fastidiously scrubbed.

I brought the glass to my nose. Bubbles rose to the surface and burst, wafting an aroma that was a little bit like roses and a little bit like peaches, nostalgia and a summer's day and somehow like home, if I had a home to speak of. When I looked up, everyone in the room had a glass and was clearly anticipating the toast.

"To the mistress of the labyrinth," said Jareth, simply, and raised his glass with a little smile. I could see where his gloves ended when his sleeves fell away, and I thought of the wounds beneath them, invisible to our guests. My fingers gave a little throb in response.

"Champagne?" I asked him, raising my glass in reply with the rest of the room. The glasses caught the light as they moved in unison. I could see the twin stars from my diadem reflected in the flute.

"Near enough," he said, looping his arm through mine so that we had to stand very close to drink. His body pressed warmly against me, even though all the frills and the ruffles. As the champagne touched my lips, he murmured, "And to my queen and our unconventional story."

It was strong enough that I nearly couldn't swallow it, dry and sweet all at once, a contradiction in terms. I paused, holding it on my tongue, and then I tossed my head back to accept it. I drained my glass, and he held me tightly in his arms as the world swam around us, just once, before straightening back out.

"I shall have the first dance," he said, and I nodded.

He led me out to the dance floor, where he cradled me against his body, exquisitely delicate with the hand that he knew was burned. We were very nearly forgotten in the sway of bodies and rustling fabrics, and he was such a confident leader that it didn't seem to matter that I'd always thought of myself as having two left feet in lieu of any rhythm to speak of.

Every so often, we passed by the perimeter of the floor and he plucked another flute from the tray of a waiting goblin, alternating between sipping from it himself and offering it to me. In this way, I found myself floating along the floor, all insecurities forgotten, my hair coming loose to stream in gentle waves down my back.

"Some party, Jareth." I smiled up at him and saw something in his face soften.

"I am glad to know that it meets your expectations." He twirled me beneath his arm, and a laugh bubbled up in my throat.

"My expectations are simpler than you think."

He drew me in close, his hands at my waist. "Are they?"

"Yes," I laughed again, "I just expect that you'll disappoint me, and then I am never disappointed. It doesn't make any sense, does it? That I would keep myself happy by expecting disappointment, I mean. It isn't that you're so very _bad_ , Jareth. You are, you know, but then again, how could you be bad when you have no moral code to speak of? Your whole world is grey. You just don't understand anything at all, and you bring out the very worst in me."

I stroked a gloved fingertip beneath his glove, across the burn that I knew was hidden there. His eyes went hard and his mouth went tight. "Perhaps you should sit for a spell. You are unused to our spirits."

As if to confirm that I should, indeed, sit for a spell, I tripped over my own feet, stumbling into his arms and falling against his chest. He steered me to a chair at a table and helped me into it, and I half-fell, clutching my skirts around myself. I watched him glide away from me, back toward the crowd, and within a moment, a gaggle of nymphs had fallen upon him.

He kissed the wrist of one, the fingers of the next, and when a green-eyed nymph smiled up at him through coquettish lashes, he lingered with his lips by her ear for too long, his fingers threaded through coal-black hair. He drew back and she threw her head back, bared her throat to laugh at whatever he had said, and he caught her hand, his eyes meeting mine just for a moment before inviting her to dance.

His steely gaze cut me to the quick. My heart threatened to beat out of my chest as embarrassment and jealousy stained my cheeks scarlet. He was punishing me publicly, and here I sat, unsteady and angry, not quite one of them. Not yet.

But I was not afraid to create a scene of my own, and when a suitably blond, blue-eyed boy with a crooked smile and pointed ears offered me his arm, I took it and allowed him to sweep me right back to the floor. My balance was shaky, and the height of my heels only further hindered me, so I leaned heavily into him, laughing as we blew champagne-scented air into each other's faces.

He spoke a dialect that fell awkwardly on my ears, but our smiles were universal enough, and though I was painfully aware each second of where Jareth and his consort were relative to me, the boy was more than adequate distraction. He wasn't as skilled a dancer as Jareth, but he gamely kept me upright as we followed the motion of the crowd. When another boy tapped me on the shoulder and offered his arm, I placed a kiss on the blond boy's cheek, leaving a crimson smudge of lipstick too close to his mouth, and then spun away in the arms of the next, and then the next, and then the next in a seemingly endless procession of beautiful, starry-eyed forest children, until I was dizzy and exhilarated and had nearly forgotten about my spurning by the goblin king.

Finally, after what felt like hours, with sore feet and an aching smile, he filled my vision, burning brightly with righteous anger, and then he took me back into his arms.

"Darling," I said, tilting my head to look up at him. "How nice of you to join me."

"The final dance of the night will always be mine," he growled into my ear, giving my bad hand enough of a squeeze to bring tears to my eyes. The flames from the candles burning low in the chandeliers above us blurred as I blinked them away, and he swayed with me, keeping me on my feet though each step was agony.

I arched my neck up toward him, and he dropped his head obligingly. "Bring me the girl."

"What do you want with her?"

"I think," I said, emphasizing the occlusive, "she has overreached her station." His eyes narrowed. "If you love me, you will bring her to me."

"Jealousy becomes you," he said, and when the final strains of the music died away in the ballroom, he left me there, at the center of the room.

He returned with the nymph, her hand in his, and brought her before me. He stepped back, to my side, and as she turned her face up to mine, the laughter died in her eyes and her voice dried to dust in her throat.

I touched the crown at my brow, the velvet petals of the flower, the insistent heat of the stars, and I looked at her. The simple golden dress belted at her waist, tiny shoes on tiny feet, the curl to her dark, dark hair and the fringe of lashes around her green eyes. She was a pale imitation of me, and I knew that I outshone her, on this day or any other.

"You are nothing," I said, and my voice rang out in the room. "You are nothing, and you are no one."

She nodded frantically, cast her eyes down to my feet.

"Kneel before your queen," I said, and she collapsed to her knees immediately, as though her legs had been waiting for the excuse to buckle beneath her. "You are never to darken these doorways again. You are to be nameless and faceless even among your own people. You will never set eyes upon him again, but you will always remember the night you danced with a king."

She was silent, motionless except where her arms shook, braced against the ground.

"Kiss him goodbye," I said, and she looked up at me, her face white. Jareth made a small movement at my side. "Kiss him goodbye," I repeated, my voice like a blade, and she trembled as she picked herself up from the ground, and with tiny, frightened steps, she approached Jareth, who remained motionless before her. She rose to her toes before him, hardly daring to look at him as she touched her lips to his.

Then she turned to flee, and before she took more than one stride, I called after her. "No gratitude after being granted the king's kiss?"

She sank into a clumsy curtsy in her rush to leave the castle. "Thank you, your majesty," she stammered, and as she did, there was a gentle electric sensation down my arms and into my fingers, and her features began to run together until she was unrecognizable. She turned to walk placidly away, and with a vacant, unremarkable smile, she murmured to the crowd that drew back, parting around her, "Did you know I once danced with a king?"

I had expected the remaining guests to look horrified, but the faces that weren't aloof were creased with grim respect. The fae from the neighboring kingdom drew close to say their goodbyes, and they leaned close. "Truly an impressive evening. Well met, Queen Sarah."

As goblins ran through the hall, whooping and finishing abandoned glasses of champagne, Jareth and I left the ballroom to the sound of shattering glass on the floor.

"It was unnecessary and cruel," he was saying.

I gripped his arm, wishing for the effect of the drinks to wear off. "We are both cruel, you and I," I said.

"The nymphs will not look kindly on us."

"If I recall correctly," I said, smothering a giggle, "you started it." We were at the door to my chambers, and he opened it, ushering me inside. I pulled him in behind me and closed the door. "I told you that I would be Mistress of the Labyrinth, and that is exactly what I intend to be." I turned and presented the buttons down my back to him, standing before the vanity.

He drew a breath and then released it, and I found that I could hear a smile even through the exasperation in his sigh. When my eyes found his face, they confirmed it. His fingers brushed the buttons, unhooking them. The fabric began to fall away from my back. The air was cold against my skin as he continued. "You are ever a surprise, Sarah. I should have learned by now not to underestimate you."

"If they will not love me, they will fear me."

"They could have loved you."

"They want to love _you_ ," I said petulantly, "and I will not share."

"My jealous queen," he said, removing his gloves to continue with the buttons at the small of my back. The material slid across my skin. I slipped my arms out of the sleeves, and the dress fell to my waist. He paused. I smiled. Another two buttons, and the garment streamed past my hips to the floor in a glorious puddle of ivory charmeuse and pearls. He reached around me to cup my breasts in warm hands, and I sighed.

I reached to a little carved box that sat on the vanity, eased it open on reluctant hinges, and plucked the chain from within, holding it between two gloved fingers. His eyes followed the motion of my hand, then clouded.

"I had hoped that you had had rather enough of that," he said. I dropped it where it lay half-in, half-out of the little box.

"I don't want you to forget it."

"That is unlikely," he said, examining his wrists. I turned and stepped into his personal space, stripping him unceremoniously of his jacket.

"Whose kiss do you prefer the taste of?" I asked him, hovering just past his lips. He leaned in, eyes fluttering shut.

"Yours," he whispered, and I moved forward to meet his parted lips with my own, to erase the touch of the raven-haired nymph, to overwrite it with my own. His fingers knotted in my hair, and I pulled free of my gloves, wounded hand an afterthought, to fist my fingers in his silken shirt.

I pulled him down to bed and kissed him deeply, touching the gold on his eyelids and the black on his eyebrows, leaving daubs of crimson along his jaw and down his neck, and then on each finger in turn, but when he moved to touch me lower, I caught his wrist.

"No," I said, and drew his arms around me. He pressed his hips needfully against mine, to show me exactly how hard he was, to show me the magnitude of his desire, but I closed my eyes and shifted my hips back into him, just once, listening to his answering sigh before I drifted off to sleep.

I woke to a rhythmic pulse and thrum in my sex as his thumb strummed over my nipple, again and again and again, the hard length of him pushing insistently up against me.

"Good morning," he purred, and his hand traveled lower to find the wet heat at my core and answer the hunger rising in me. I moaned, long and low and needy as his fingers sank into me, setting an immediate, generous tempo that my sleep-sated body rocked to meet. I reached back behind my head and found his head at my shoulder, his breath hot against my neck.

Tangling my fingers in his hair, I brought him nearer still, his mouth meeting the junction between neck and shoulder, his tongue laving across my skin. I reached down with my other hand to brush a finger against myself, and he stilled his motion, fingers buried inside me.

"Let me," he said, and it was a plea breathed against my skin. I turned over, rose from the bed and stood beside it, and he blinked sleepy, arousal-dilated eyes at me in confusion before he, too, stepped down from the bed to stand before me.

"Kneel," I said, and he moved gracefully to his knees, stroking up my legs, lifting one and placing my foot on the mattress so that I was open to him. He kissed me, just there, and my eyes rolled back as his mouth closed over my clit, his fingers unerringly finding the spot deep inside me that made me weak. I trembled, and he braced my elevated knee with his hand.

I looked down at him, sensations rippling through me as he licked and sucked, crooking his fingers just so. My hands found his hair again, holding him against me, and my hips shifted of their own volition. He hummed with satisfaction and I found myself shaking and crying against him, and as I did he lifted me, laid me across the bed, and in one movement he was buried deep inside of me.

Without allowing me the chance to recover, he pushed me higher and higher, hips snapping him into me harder and harder, thrusting through the peak of my climax until I was coming down without coming down, my nub swollen and tender and grinding against him until I was writhing and sobbing anew beneath him, praying for release as the excitement built like a wave beneath my unsteady feet.

He throbbed within me as I cried out, arching my back to meet him, and when he had spent himself, he laid next to me, panting.

"How long until you let me touch you again?" he asked. Cautiousness crept in behind his eyes.

"I don't know," I answered, and he dropped from where he'd held himself up on his forearms to bury his face in the pillows.

"I love you," he said without looking at me.

"You don't," I said. I padded off, naked, to draw a bath, and when I returned, clean and fragrant, he had gone.

The day passed, as each had since my arrival, without further interaction between us. Somehow, today, it felt emptier and lonelier than usual. The look in his eyes was niggling at me; it had been a close cousin to the baseless, exhausted hope in Josh's eyes when he'd offered me the doll, or the fear and partial resignation in the nymph's eyes when she hadn't been sure of her fate. Maybe it had been the uncertain look of a man who wasn't sure whether or not he'd been handed a death sentence. I found that I couldn't bear the thought of venturing out past the castle, into the labyrinth.

I'd looked for Hoggle many times since the day he'd taken me to see the dungeons, but I had never found him, and I had never asked for him. Since the debacle with the nymph, I didn't imagine he would be thrilled to see me. I hardly felt prepared to deal patiently and gracefully with his obvious disapproval of my actions. Who besides Hoggle dared blame me? My brother was dead and my name had passed from my parents' mouths; I was cursed to remain here, the unlucky queen of the labyrinth that both loved and hated me.

I wandered the hallways of the castle. I stood in the threshold to the Escher room and tried to hold it in my mind, and when I found myself growing dizzy, I turned away. I climbed up to his throne, conscious of the way the knee-length skirt flared away from me, and I sat there, high above the room, legs tucked beneath me until I was pestered by enough goblins to make my head spin. I stopped at the kitchens to have warm bread and butter for lunch, feeling more a child than a queen.

And then, as the sun sank low on the horizon, I made my way to my favored tower to watch the play of colors over the maze. I climbed the stairs slowly, though my body did not grow fatigued, and when I reached the top, he was already there.

The setting sun turned him to burnished gold, here in the highest tower.

He was always beautiful, but the red-gold glow of the dying light rendered him a fallen angel, aeonian and aureate. He lifted his chin - slowly, carefully. His eyes were dark. The final rays of sunlight danced across his skin, a lover far gentler than I, and though I had always thought of him as a nighttime creature - he had, after all, chosen the form of an owl from which to watch me - he seemed somehow frail as day turned to night.

"Have you come to kill me?" he asked, exhausted.

"I have never intended to kill you," I said, my tongue shaping the truth without my permission. If it hadn't leapt from my mouth of its own accord, I would have been struck dumb by his question and the immediate ensuing recognition that the look I'd been considering all day had been the uncertain look of a man who wasn't sure whether or not he'd been handed a death sentence and extended one final mercy before death. Even so, this new, involuntary adherence to truthfulness would require acclimation.

"I thought I could smell it on you," he murmured, "but perhaps it was only my expectation. Perhaps it was the last vestiges of your former species fleeing you. Your people have iron in their lifeblood. My kind thought my pursuit exceptionally foolish. It is not without reason that stories like ours end in tragedy. Star-crossed lovers, aren't we, Sarah?"

"I hadn't thought it."

"I have loved," he said, swallowing, the blue light of the moon illuminating the ivory hollow of his throat, "but I have never lost. Not until now."

"You haven't loved," I said, with a gilded laugh like wind chimes, a sound unremembered. "That quote has never been meant for you. And I'm quite sure it isn't true. Do you think the nymph who fought so desperately against our coupling is better off for having loved and lost?"

"She had a name."

"I don't care to remember it."

His mouth twisted. "Have you come to say goodbye, then?"

"I'm not leaving, Jareth."

"Your brother is dead."

"My brother is dead," I agreed, "but even wandering to the edges of this world or any other will not bring him back. Where could I go? The labyrinth sings to me. The maze runs hot in my blood. She will not give me what I want, but she gives to me according to my merits and she grants me what I need. I remain more alive here than I could possibly be anywhere else, so I will stay and live out my days, such as they are fated to be, with you. She has become our labyrinth, after all."

"I love you," he said, and his eyes were depthless.

I smiled.

* * *

It's always the same story - but I can't remember how it goes. Not anymore.

This is what I can remember.

It went like this: there was once a young princess who wished she was not.

There was once a monster, prowling a maze.

There was once a boy, a beautiful boy.

There was once a vengeful king.

There was once a jealous god.

In his duties, the king was possessed of the power to grant wishes and take children, until one day the wished-away was reclaimed, and he could not forget the should-be princess who had bested him, and his appetite could not be satiated.

The young princess, who wished she was not, searched her heart for love for the boy, though she had only known him for a short time. She whispered to him the secret of the maze, and, determined to take up his mantle, he summoned the king.

The boy - the beautiful boy - laid himself down as a sacrifice to try to win the heart of the girl in challenging the king.

The boy slew the monster and escaped the maze, to the great pleasure of the wrathful king.

But the monster was not what it seemed, and its defeat brought great sorrow to all those who had expected joy.

The boy, overcome with the knowledge of what had transpired, left the princess, who became determined to take up her title, her crown, her glory, all for the novelty of love - or was it power? - and the chance to alter the course of her own life.

And what of the god? The god, of course, was also the king, and he laid claim to his queen as her humanity fled.

So who was the true monster? The king? The god? The boy?

Was it the princess?


End file.
